Phil Klay Quotes

You have to beat your own problematic imagination to discover what it is you're saying and how to say it and move forward into the unknown.

As a young kid I assumed that everybody was sort of on the same wavelength as I was and then I found out in a lot of small ways that that wasn't the case. It's sort of a mixed blessing. My mind is like a puppy. It goes all over. I guess writing fiction was a way of harnessing that. I could hook a puppy up to a treadmill and get something out of it.

All a person can do in this life is gather about him his integrity, his imagination, and his individuality – and with these ever with him, out front and in sharp focus, leap into the dance of experience.

Building worlds is not enough for the deeper urging mind; but a loving heart sates the striving spirit.

The more I see and know about life, the more ideas I have and the more I want to make art.

There are so many things I want to do. Like, I want to get an artist, a musician, a photographer, and a bunch of dancers that I know and just travel across Africa and just film it and just see what happens. Do and learn as much as I possibly can. Luckily, I have a lot more time.

A novel can enlarge the empathy and imagination of both its author and its reader, and my experience, that sense of enlargement is most intense when I'm transported beyond the narrow limits of my daily life.

It is not true that we have only one life to live; if we can read, we can live as many more lives and as many kinds of lives as we wish.

Don't worry about writing a book or getting famous or making money. Just lead an interesting life.

Writing gives me the opportunity to explore ideas, play with language, solve problems, use my imagination, and draw on my own childhood.

I hope you will go out and let stories happen to you, and that you will work them, water them with your blood and tears and you laughter till they bloom, till you yourself burst into bloom.

Dr. Einstein was not successful in school, but he found something in the air from his own imagination and his own brain power, and look what he did.

Literature helps us transcend ourselves.

Through writing, through that process, they realize that they become more intelligent, and more honest and more imaginative than they can be in any other part of their life.

I write because I have always been curious about what it would feel like to be someone else, in a different situation. Fiction is a wonderful way of exploring that.

I've been a story-teller all my life but I realized it only recently.

There's a wealth of talent that lies in all of us. All of us, including those who work in schools, must nurture creativity systematically and not kill it unwittingly.

If you ever have a kid who doesn't know what to do, stick him in art school. It's amazing what evolves.

I think the only reason I wanted to do modeling, really, was because I knew I wasn't ready to act; I knew I didn't have enough life experience, and I knew that doing photo shoots was a way of acting. Playing a character each shoot and being able to just emerge yourself in these awkward experiences - it was amazing.

Even in times when it's difficult to figure out, how do you go forward, art - and books - always help.

The art of transformation is a very important thing to me, and I always believe I can say something more truthful through characters that are further away from me.

The dream is to keep surprising yourself, never mind the audience.

The new idea for me now is creativity. I like to express myself.

Sometimes I'm not even aware of some of the issues going on with me in my life until I sit down and start kind of looking for inspiration, trying to find something that inspires that creativity.

Studying acting has been personally enriching because it has taught me to take the time to imagine what someone else's life experience might be like. To look deeply at how our pasts and the circumstances of our early childhoods mold us as people.