The thing that most attracts me to historical fiction is taking the factual record as far as it is known using that as scaffolding and then letting imagination build the structure that fills in those things we can never find out for sure.

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.

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.

It's through the small things that we develop our moral imagination so that we can understand the sufferings of others.

I feel that directors at times are like the janitors on the set. I am the secretary I am the organizer I am the maid and I ask if they have eaten or rested. The best things are always out of your control. It's those moments that surpass the imagination that are thrilling.

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.

I've got quite a vivid imagination and I'm easily overwhelmed by sensations and things that are beautiful or scary. I don't think I've ever seen a ghost - I think I'm probably haunted by my own ghosts than real ones.

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.

The face of nature and civilization in this our country is to a certain point a very sufficient literary field. But it will yield its secrets only to a really grasping imagination. To write well and worthily of American things one need even more than elsewhere to be a master.

People write memoirs because they lack the imagination to make things up.