The imagination loses vitality as it ceases to adhere to what is real.

But fantasy kills imagination, pornography is death to art.

When imagination fails, compassion and humaneness dwindle and atrophy along with it. Unleavened by imagination, the variety and richness of life turn into flat abstractions; people become objects to be manipulated — with the social consequences we know all too well.

The imagination loses vitality as it ceases to adhere to what is real. When it adheres to the unreal and intensifies what is unreal, while its first effect may be extraordinary, that effect is the maximum effect that it will ever have.

An addiction to distraction is the death of your creative production.

You can't depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus.

Anybody who lets facts interfere with his imagination is a person who will never enjoy anything else again.

Now there is nothing in this world I abominate worse, than to be interrupted in a story...

The greatest killer of creativity is interruption. It pulls your mind away from what you want to be thinking about. Research has shown that, after an interruption, it can take eight minutes for you to return to your previous state of consciousness, and up to twenty minutes to get back into a state of deep focus.

You can't depend on your judgment when your imagination is out of focus.

If a big diamond is cut up into pieces, it immediately loses its value as a whole; or if an army is scattered or divided into small bodies, it loses all its power; and in the same way a great intellect has no more power than an ordinary one as soon as it is interrupted, disturbed, distracted, or diverted; for its superiority entails that it concentrates all its strength on one point and object, just as a concave mirror concentrates all the rays of light thrown upon it. Noisy interruption prevents this concentration. This is why the most eminent intellects have always been strongly averse to any kind of disturbance, interruption and distraction, and above everything to that violent interruption which is caused by noise; other people do not take any particular notice of this sort of thing.

Inertia is the death of creativity. You have to stay in the groove. When you get out of the groove, you start to dread the work, because you know it’s going to suck for a while — it’s going to suck until you get back into the flow.

To make abstractions hold in reality is to destroy reality.

We let what we know limit what we can imagine; the result, a failure of imagination.