Imagination and fiction make up more than three quarters of our real life.

Imagination is the true magic carpet.

Everything you can imagine is real.

And for me, the real world involves everything: risk, danger, beauty, energy, all we meet with in the real world.

Fantasy is a necessary ingredient in living, it's a way of looking at life through the wrong end of a telescope, and that enables you to laugh at life's realities.

I'm less interested in reality. I'm more interested in perception, the truth of the universe that we see.

People think that by living on some mountainside in a tent and being frozen to death by freezing rain, they're somehow discovering reality, but of course that's just another fiction dreamed up by a TV producer.

Truth is stranger than fiction; fiction has to make sense.

The past is really almost as much a work of the imagination as the future.

Everything you can imagine is real.

Facts sometimes have a strange and bizarre power that makes their inherent truth seem unbelievable.

The realities of the world seldom measure up to the sublime designs of human imagination.

Mostly, I straddle reality and the imagination. My reality needs imagination like a bulb needs a socket. My imagination needs reality like a blind man needs a cane.

Fantasy is toxic: the private cruelty and the world war both have their start in the heated brain.

To treat your facts with imagination is one thing, to imagine your facts is another.

There are two - parallel - universes of science. One is the actual day-to-day work of scientists, patiently researching into all parts of the world and sometimes making amazing discoveries. The other is the role science plays in the public imagination - the powerful effect it has in shaping how millions of ordinary people see the world.

I have realized that the past and future are real illusions, that they exist in the present, which is what there is and all there is.

Reality continues to ruin my life.

A dream will always triumph over reality, once it is given the chance.

Good science fiction is always based in contemporary truths.

I learned a long time ago that reality was much weirder than anyone's imagination.

Art must take reality by surprise.

We live in a fantasy world, a world of illusion. The great task in life is to find reality.

The world of reality has its limits; the world of imagination is boundless.

Imagination is not something apart and hermetic, not a way of leaving reality behind; it is a way of engaging reality.

For me they are no different, reality and dreams.

All of us grow up in particular realities - a home, family, a clan, a small town, a neighborhood. Depending upon how we're brought up, we are either deeply aware of the particular reading of reality into which we are born, or we are peripherally aware of it.

I can't remember any dreams in my life. There's so much strange in real life that it often seems like a dream.

Science fiction encourages us to explore... all the futures, good and bad, that the human mind can envision.

Imagination creates reality.

Fiction reveals truths that reality obscures.

Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities. Truth isn't.

The use of travelling is to regulate imagination by reality, and instead of thinking how things may be, to see them as they are.

Only the dreamer shall understand realities, though in truth his dreaming must be not out of proportion to his waking.

The world is indeed a mixture of truth and make-believe. Discard the make-believe and take the truth.

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

In order to dream, you need to have a springboard which is the facts... It gives it that touch of reality, and I think that's quite important... truth with fiction.

Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.

The dream is real, my friends. The failure to realize it is the only unreality.

Real shapes and real patterns are things you would observe in nature, like the marks on the back of a cobra's hood or the markings on a fish or a lizard. Imaginary shapes are just that, symbols that come to a person in dreams or reveries and are charged with meaning.

Nothing is as real as a dream. The world can change around you, but your dream will not. Your life may change, but your dream doesn't have to. Responsibilities need not erase it. Duties need not obscure it.

I know how fiction matters to me, because if I want to express myself, I have to make up a story. Some people call it imagination. To me, it's not imagination. It's just a way of watching.

Heaven knows, I've exposed myself in my novels through the use of fantasy and imagination... now my new book is about what really happened to me... not my heroines.

Imagination is always the fabric of social life and the dynamic of history. The influence of real needs and compulsions, of real interests and materials, is indirect because the crowd is never conscious of it.

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.

The problem with people who are afraid of imagination, of fantasy, is that their world becomes so narrow that I don't see how they can imagine beyond what their senses can verify. We know from science that there are entire worlds that our senses can't verify.

The romantic idealism of my youth has been replaced with realism and hard work at what I love.

It's no wonder that truth is stranger than fiction. Fiction has to make sense.

Reality only reveals itself when it is illuminated by a ray of poetry.

Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't.

Dreams have always expanded our understanding of reality by challenging our boundaries of the real, of the possible.

I believe that hunger for a 'lost dimension' of experience is a natural yearning in all of us, and it doesn't go away just because we ignore it. It is evidenced among other places in the millions of children and adults who obsessively read the 'Harry Potter' books. It is said that fiction is where someone gets to tell the truth.

It was taunted as reality. It was dangled as a carrot. In terms of people's hopes and dreams, to say that that is less of a reality than the daily grind they find themselves in is maybe not correct.

Reality leaves a lot to the imagination.

Like all novelists, I'm interested in the filters between reality and the imagination.

I'm half living my life between reality and fantasy at all times.

Truth is so much more interesting than the fiction we're used to.

Reality is wrong. Dreams are for real.

It always amuses me that the biggest praise for my work comes for the imagination, while the truth is that there's not a single line in all my work that does not have a basis in reality. The problem is that Caribbean reality resembles the wildest imagination.

I would say movies all have their own world or reality they're built in.

In science fiction, you can also test out your own realities.

There is one thing the photograph must contain, the humanity of the moment. This kind of photography is realism. But realism is not enough - there has to be vision, and the two together can make a good photograph.

There's basically an element of fiction in everything you remember. Imagination and memory are almost the same brain processes. When I write fiction, I know that I'm using a bunch of lies that I've made up to create some form of truth. When I write a memoir, I'm using true elements to create something that will always be somehow fictionalized.

Obviously the facts are never just coming at you but are incorporated by an imagination that is formed by your previous experience. Memories of the past are not memories of facts but memories of your imaginings of the facts.

Science fiction is the great opportunity to speculate on what could happen. It does give me, as a futurist, scenarios.

Science fiction and fantasy is a kind of literature that embodies the highest aspirations of the human race.

The world is seldom what it seems; to man, who dimly sees, realities appear as dreams, and dreams realities.

The Real is ever-present, like the screen on which the cinematographic pictures move. While the picture appears on it, the screen remains invisible. Stop the picture, and the screen will become clear. All thoughts and events are merely pictures moving on the screen of Pure Consciousness, which alone is real.