With the world as it now presents itself there is something perverse and probably dysfunctional about a person who stays in the same house for 40 years. What about the expanding family syndrome the school-lottery migration the property portfolio neurosis? Have you no imagination?

The question is how to bring a work of imagination out of one language that was just as taken-for-granted by the persons who used it as our language is by ourselves. Nothing strange about it.

Imagination which comes into play in falling in love is different from any other. Certainly in my case and I've fallen in love all my life one imagines the person to be as you want them to be. They frequently turn out to be someone different for better or worse.

So much of what we do as artists is a combination of personal experience and imagination and how that all creeps into your work is not so linear.

I'm an emotional sort of person in general and I have a vivid imagination so I feel the whole spectrum of emotion strongly when I write.

I deeply adored my mum. She was an extraordinary person even for the prejudice I'm likely to have. She was beautiful amusing a tremendous elaborator of things into comic proportions and extravagant in her imagination.

I suppose I'm proudest of my novels for what's imagined in them. I think the world of my imagination is a richer and more interesting place than my personal biography.

I feel like I'm a much better person when I'm developing my imagination and my innocence and my vulnerability. I like that version of me better than the version where I'm just working on my analytical mind.

I'm not a passive person by any stretch of the imagination.

If Copenhagen were a person that person would be generous beautiful elderly but with a flair. A human being that has certain propensities for quarrelling filled with imagination and with appetite for the new and with respect for the old - somebody who takes good care of things and of people.

Essentially I'm untrained so I just go with my imagination and try to put myself as solidly as I can into the shoes of whatever person I'm going to be playing.

I don't want to discredit people's individuality but I think people are pretty much the same. People are very similar. If you have a good enough imagination then you can feel things that you personally have never done before. That's acting.

Never lose sight of the fact that all human felicity lies in man's imagination and that he cannot think to attain it unless he heeds all his caprices. The most fortunate of persons is he who has the most means to satisfy his vagaries.

Growing up I didn't have a lot of toys and personal entertainment depended on individual ingenuity and imagination - think up a story and go live it for an afternoon.

The moment a person forms a theory his imagination sees in every object only the traits which favor that theory.

Personally I would sooner have written Alice in Wonderland than the whole Encyclopedia Britannica.

Imagine for yourself a character a model personality whose example you determine to follow in private as well as in public.