That suspension of disbelief that's required as an actor to live truthfully in imaginary circumstances is different to what needs to happen as a director, in the sense that you are the master of all the moving parts. You create the world in every detail.

Alex O'Loughlin

/images/quoteimage/a-j-p-taylorburak-482.jpg

The crusade against Communism was even more imaginary than the specter of Communism.

I never understood the realism of an imaginary circumstance. While I was doing 'Smoke Signals,' I relied on my instinct and what I grew up with. I had this energy, but it was a one-dimensional thing.

Adam Beach

Men Wit While

My favorite thing to do as a kid was pretend I was in the opening credits of a sitcom. As the theme song would play, I'd look up at the imaginary camera and smile as my name would flash on the screen.

Adam F. Goldberg

Smile Would Up

When you make a record, you get to live in an imaginary world where you have the best kind of band on every song.

Adam Granduciel

You World Where

The real Amazons were long believed to be purely imaginary. They were the mythical warrior women who were the archenemies of the ancient Greeks. Every Greek hero or champion, from Hercules to Theseus and Achilles, had to prove his mettle by fighting a powerful warrior queen.

Adrienne Mayor

Women War Power

That suspension of disbelief that's required as an actor to live truthfully in imaginary circumstances is different to what needs to happen as a director, in the sense that you are the master of all the moving parts. You create the world in every detail.

Alex O'Loughlin

Truth Art You

I did have an imaginary girlfriend.

Alexander Dreymon

Imaginary ID Girlfriend

I would hate to be in high school now. Psychologists talk about the 'imaginary audience' that teens seem to feel they have around them and that makes them think they have to keep up their image all the time. Now with Facebook and MySpace and 24/7 online access, that imaginary audience has become real.

Alexandra Robbins

Time Teen Space

Imaginary friends are one of the weirder forms of pretend play in childhood. But the research shows that imaginary friends actually help children understand the other people around them and imagine all the many ways that people could be.

Alison Gopnik

Weirder Weird Ways

Even the very youngest children already are perfectly able to discriminate between the imaginary and the real, whether in books or movies or in their own pretend play. Children with the most elaborate and beloved imaginary friends will gently remind overenthusiastic adults that these companions are, after all, just pretend.

Alison Gopnik

Movies Love Youngest Child

I had a strong propensity, which I still have, to be invisible. In grade school, I'd try to disappear and become formless. I lived in a very imaginary world. I loved poetry and wrote my first novel when I was 9. It was about a little girl and the people she met in the woods.

Amanda Plummer

Poetry Love Wrote

I've always felt like, you know, there's this imaginary wall that we ourselves put up or others do by saying that we can't do something.

Amber Liu

You Yin Ways

I never really did abandon my true self. It's not like I invented this imaginary person and started to be her.

Amy Lee

Art Vent True

It is living and ceasing to live that are imaginary solutions. Existence is elsewhere.

Andre Breton

Where Ten T

My mom is an experimental chemist and physicist, so she is a cut-and-dried, nuts-and-bolts kind of woman, and my dad is a theoretical chemist, so we were definitely raised with his philosophical point of view: imaginary numbers and dimensions beyond our own. That's the kind of thing we would talk about.

Andrew Sean Greer

Mom Men Would

It's queer how ready people always are with advice in any real or imaginary emergency, and no matter how many times experience has shown them to be wrong, they continue to set forth their opinions, as if they had received them from the Almighty!

Anne Sullivan

Time Experience Wrong

It's true that it's a solitary occupation, but you would be surprised at how much companionship a group of imaginary characters can offer once you get to know them.

Anne Tyler

You Would Up

I realized I couldn't be a journalist because I like to take a side, to have an opinion and a point a view; I liked to step across the imaginary boundary of the objective view that the journalist is supposed to have and be involved.

Annie Leibovitz

View Use Us

I think that when we start thought-policing people and idea-policing people, then that's crossing a line. And I think, you know, everybody's so afraid of this imaginary line of thought police that they forget their own personal safety.

Ashton Kutcher

Art You Very

Imaginary obstacles are insurmountable. Real ones aren't.

Barbara Sher

UN Table T

One of the strange things about imaginary food is that it allows us to take pleasure in reading about things that we would never want to eat in real life.

Bee Wilson

Growing up as a chubby kid with a ton of imaginary friends and a Cyndi Lauper obsession, I learned about rejection early on and was constantly trying to avoid it.

Beth Ditto

I really could've been a good student, but I was always hearing an imaginary audience.

Billy Crystal

I'm asked all the time, 'Doesn't it feel great to finish the novel?' And the answer to that is, 'No.' It's sort of a loss to stop a 10-year project, which is an imaginary project in the sense that it's a work of my imagination.

Bob Shacochis

I want to make a drug. I want the science to be more than imaginary, where I think, 'We're learning these fundamental principles, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.' I think we are doing that, but I want to do something really practical. I want to actually, in my lifetime, help people.

Bonnie Bassler

Institutionalized racism is an imaginary enemy.

Bret Stephens

Science fiction is essentially a kind of fiction in which people learn more about how to live in the real world, visiting imaginary worlds unlike our own in order to investigate, by way of pleasurable thought-experiments, how things might be done differently.

Brian Stableford

From the viewpoint of the writer, the most significant aspect of fantasy and science fiction is that stories of these kinds are either set in imaginary worlds or feature the appearance in the familiar world of some imaginary entity.

Brian Stableford

I had an imaginary friend. I don't know when I stopped having an imaginary friend, but my mom and everybody in my family remembers it pretty good. It's definitely true.

CC Sabathia

James's expedition to Scotland is wholly imaginary, though there appears to have been space for it during Henry's progress to the North to pay his devotions at Beverley Minster.

Charlotte Mary Yonge

Youth is impulsive. When our young men grow angry at some real or imaginary wrong, and disfigure their faces with black paint, it denotes that their hearts are black, and that they are often cruel and relentless, and our old men and old women are unable to restrain them. Thus it has ever been.

Chief Seattle

When I was in school, I was always writing scripts and dressing up as characters. I'd constantly be that guy who'd get up on stage. I used to write imaginary TV shows, like soap operas, for fun.

Chris Lilley

Somewhere in this process, I begin reading and showing my book to my audience. When I say my audience, I mean a single imaginary child who is a blend of myself as a young person, the students in my wife's classroom of first- through third-graders, and the students from two classrooms I visit regularly in the Bronx, New York.

Chris Raschka

I took my first acting class at age 6 because I found out that's what Carol Burnett was doing - acting. Also she had an imaginary friend as a kid and went to UCLA, two things we have in common. I will always admire her and hope one day, I can make someone laugh a fraction as hard as she's made me bellyache.

Christine Lakin

All writers are obviously neurotic... For various reasons, writers retreat into an imaginary world because they find ordinary life rather difficult or boring or both.

Christopher Koch

I've always had a really active imagination. Lots of kids have imaginary friends. Mine just took on a rather demonic form.

Claire Danes

The imaginary world has always been the most fun place for me to be.

Claire Forlani

I think I was a shy kid. I grew up without television. I had a dog, and we lived up in the White Mountains in the summer, and I had no friends up there. And I would just go play hide-and-seek with my dog and probably had some imaginary friends.

Dan Brown

The more science I studied, the more I saw that physics becomes metaphysics and numbers become imaginary numbers. The farther you go into science, the mushier the ground gets. You start to say, 'Oh, there is an order and a spiritual aspect to science.'

Dan Brown

Certainly, no studio is going to put its money and its muscle behind something that they don't think they can spin five or six movies out of and build a whole kind of imaginary universe from anymore, I think.

Dave Itzkoff

Disney made a fortune out of inventing the businessman's idea of the imaginary as the contradictory of the businessman's idea of the real.

David Antin

I like cartoons. I like 'Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends.' It's funny! It has things that kids wouldn't get. It's like, if you're mature, you get it. I like that and 'The Fairly OddParents.'

David Archuleta

As so many writers know, the experience of creating an imaginary world is closer to dreaming than it is to normal, grit-your-teeth work. It's preconscious rather than conscious. Ideas fall into your head, and the book writes you, rather than the other way around.

David Ignatius

Growing up a lonely only child prepared me for the years of solitude spent as a writer; years spent in the company of people who don't exist, imaginary people you have conversations with. It's a paid form of madness, this writing stuff.

Debi Gliori

When I was a kid, I was always going to bed creating a story, and that was the birth of filmmaking for me. I would like going to the dream-state by telling the story to someone else in my mind. That was my imaginary friend; it was an imaginary audience listening to my story.

Denis Villeneuve

It's strange: I always try to do the best acting job I can do under the imaginary circumstances of my working position at any given time. But it's terrible when you know it's going bad, and you know it immediately. But you just have to still try to do the best job you can.

Dennis Hopper

I think for me, the imaginary world was always exciting. I started in New York doing theatre, from having just one person in an audience to performing for a full house. I think I've always enjoyed playing different characters, blending into different environments and such.

Dilshad Vadsaria

If I had my life to live over, I would perhaps have more actual troubles but I'd have fewer imaginary ones.

Don Herold

I loathe the trivialization of poetry that happens in creative writing classes. Teachers set exercises to stimulate subject matter: Write a poem about an imaginary landscape with real people in it. Write about a place your parents lived in before you were born. We have enough terrible poetry around without encouraging more of it.

Donald Hall

It is a queer thing, but imaginary troubles are harder to bear than actual ones.

Dorothy Dix