They are imaginary characters. But perhaps not solely the products of my imagination since there are some aspects of the characters that relate to my own experience of a wide variety of people.

The thing about imagination is that by the very act of putting it down there must be some truth in one's own imagination.

Then there was Clark Ashton Smith who wrote for Weird Tales and who had a wild imagination. He wasn't a very talented writer but his imagination was wonderful.

It's what still excites me most about acting: letting your imagination go places it's never been before. There's nothing better than that.

It was like there was a pile of kindling that was in the back of my imagination just waiting there. Once I lit it it just flared up and I kept getting ideas and ideas.

Ellis Peters's historical detail is very accurate and very minute and therefore is not only interesting to read but good for an actor to acquire a sense of the period. And the other thing I think is that an actor lives in the land of imagination.

I don't necessarily start with the beginning of the book. I just start with the part of the story that's most vivid in my imagination and work forward and backward from there.

I'm looking for a way out of here. I can't have it physically so I'm going to have it intellectually. It was a beautiful thing to ride Seabiscuit in my imagination. And it's just fantastic to be there alongside Louie as he's breaking the NCAA mile record. People at these vigorous moments in their lives - it's my way of living vicariously.

There is no better way of exercising the imagination than the study of law. No poet ever interpreted nature as freely as a lawyer interprets the truth.

On the one hand the guns were there to help capture the imagination of the people. But more important since we knew that you couldn't observe the police without guns we took our guns with us to let the police know that we have an equalizer.

There's just so many great stories in the past that you can know a little bit about but you can't know it all and that's where imagination can work.

There can be no passion and by consequence no love where there is not imagination.

There must be room for the imagination to exercise its powers we must conceive and apprehend a thousand things which we do not actually witness.

As an actor you have to have a strong vivid imagination as you're working and when the camera's rolling but there's certainly a part of you that is aware of real life that you're making a movie.

There's the argument that you can relate to someone who's completely unrelatable. In the way that a director shows you his imagination on a film then I get to show you my imagination in a big dumb character.

There is only one admirable form of the imagination: the imagination that is so intense that it creates a new reality that it makes things happen.

For us artists there waits the joyous compromise through art with all that wounded or defeated us in daily life in this way not to evade destiny as the ordinary people try to do but to fulfil it in its true potential - the imagination.