If plants could be credited with reasoning powers, we would marvel at the imaginative ways they bribe or ensnare other creatures to carry out their wishes.
Ghetto-dwellers are the great fantasists. There was an extraordinary vibrancy there, an imaginative life. When you are that poor, all you've got left is your belief in the imagination.
SF is an opportunity to have an intense relationship with your own imagination. It's a kind of drive-by poetry, trashy and addictive; it's fun. After that, for me, it's an opportunity to explore that kind of imaginative artifact from inside, and use a little camped-up contemporary science as a way of generating new metaphors around my typical obsessions.
I think of feminism as a socially just and imaginative world.
History consists of a series of accumulated imaginative inventions.
The best historian is he who combines knowledge of the evidence with the largest intellect, the warmest human sympathy and the highest imaginative powers.
An imaginative adventure does not enjoy the same corsets as reportage.
Milton had a highly imaginative, Cowley a very fanciful mind.
To think that realistic fiction is by definition superior to imaginative fiction is to think imitation is superior to invention.
Imaginative writers often project their own monsters and meanings on basic facts.
It is of the essence of imaginative culture that it transcends the limits both of the naturally possible and of the morally acceptable.
The American idea is as promising, imaginative, and full of the unexpected as the land itself. The land represents freedom - the frontier, the ability to make a new future with your own bare hands.
[John] Adams was the best and most colorful stylist among the Founders. Although [Tomas] Jefferson is widely regarded as the smoothest writer, Adams is by far the most engaging and imaginative.
Science-fiction. . . can be defined as: Imaginative extrapolation of true natural phenomena, existing now, or likely to exist in the future.
The imaginative faculty of the soul must be fed with objects immense and eternal.
Dostoyevsky wrote of the unconscious as if it were conscious; that is in reality the reason why his characters seem 'pathological', while they are only visualized more clearly than any other figures in imaginative literature. . . He was in the rank in which we set Dante, Shakespeare and Goethe.
While the Passover narrative [in Exodus] energizes Israel's imagination toward justice, Israel's hard work of implementation of that imaginative scenario was done at Mt. Sinai. . . . Moses' difficult work at Sinai is to transform the narrative vision of the Exodus into a sustainable social practice that has institutional staying-power, credibility, and authority.
The Vores Third Quartet is a terrific piece that brings disparate components into harmony. . . it's celebratory, imaginative, touching, and fun.
The tragedy of the world is that those who are imaginative have but slight experience, and those who are experienced have feeble imaginations.
Romantic literature is in effect imaginative lying.