Actors, their greatest tool, their greatest resource is imagination. You can take things, power objects, you can recruit your dreams, you can access your memories and get there. So the idea is not to act but to just be.

— Nicolas Cage

A great many things which in times of lesser knowledge we imagined being superstitious or useless, prove today on examination to have been of immense value to mankind.

— Lafcadio Hearn

Almost no one is foolish enough to imagine that he automatically deserves great success in any field of activity, yet almost everyone believes that he automatically deserves success in marriage.

— Sydney J. Harris

An essay is a thing of the imagination. If there is information in an essay, it is by-the-by, and if there is an opinion, one need not trust it for the long run. A genuine essay rarely has an educational, polemical, or sociopolitical use; it is the movement of a free mind at play.

— Cynthia Ozick

Anything that stimulates the public's imagination about the nobility and the importance of space exploration is something that I'm very excited to be a part of.

— Ron Howard

A poet ought not to pick nature's pocket. Let him borrow, and so borrow as to repay by the very act of borrowing. Examine nature accurately, but write from recollection, and trust more to the imagination than the memory.

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge

As a bookish child in Calcutta, I used to thrill to the adventures of bad girls whose pursuit of happiness swept them outside the bounds of social decency. Tess of the d'Turberville, Emma Bovary and Anna Karenina lived large in my imagination. The naughty girls of Hollywood films flirted and knew how to drive.

— Bharati Mukherjee

As an actor, our very palette is one of imagination. So it is a walk onto an empty space and then imagine the world beyond it is what we do.

— Rhys Ifans

As a viewer, I really want to watch author-backed stories, and there is something amazing about thrillers, the way it captivates your imagination.

— Anushka Sharma

Background scores allow me an absolute flight of the imagination, and I travel in my mind's eye. I do not like the scores to have vocal notes, because they act as a limitation to these flights of fancy.

— Nawazuddin Siddiqui