Now it is quite clear to me that there are no solid spheres in the heavens and those that have been devised by the authors to save the appearances exist only in the imagination.

Let me just say that to imagine racism does not exist is imagination. And to imagine that it does not create its own set of problems is true imagination. So let's not imagine that racism is gone extinguished because it's not. We are seeing this in the top levels of the political arena and we are seeing it very very plainly.

The Chinese art world does not exist. In a society that restricts individual freedoms and violates human rights anything that calls itself creative or independent is a pretence. It is impossible for a totalitarian society to create anything with passion and imagination.

My books are elegiac in the sense that they're odes to a nation that even I sometimes think may not exist anymore except in my memory and my imagination.

Every time you get on a stage or in front of a camera the whole exercise is about imagination. You're constantly depicting something that doesn't exist and trying to find the reality of it. Once you settle on that premise everything else is a matter of degrees.

A man at work making something which he feels will exist because he is working at it and wills it is exercising the energies of his mind and soul as well as of his body. Memory and imagination help him as he works.

We imagine that we want to escape our selfish and commonplace existence but we cling desperately to our chains.

You have to imagine it possible before you can see something. You can have the evidence right in front of you but if you can't imagine something that has never existed before it's impossible.

I think in life the sense of humor and comedy always exists.

It's a different outlook and one that I understand. When you are a former member of the Warsaw Pact when you have lived behind the Berlin Wall when you have experienced the communist systems that existed in these countries for them the West represents hope.