Mark Leyner Quotes

I visualize things in my mind before I have to do them. It's like having a mental workshop.

I just get silly inside my head and I start to think about something and in my head I start twisting it around, contorting it and envisioning it in different ways.

An object is not first imagined or thought about and then expected or willed, but in being actively expected it is imagined as future and in being willed it is thought.

I have trouble writing if I can't picture how things are going to look.

I prefer radio to television. Radio is a dialogue; television is a monologue. In radio, you have to interact - they put the words in your head; you build the pictures in your mind. To that extent, it is more engaging than television.

Sometimes, I believe I actually see the wheels in my brain turning.

When I was 5 years old, I saw people dancing in my head. In college, I would choreograph for the cultural shows, and in my notes, I would actually create formations of people. It was how my whole brain worked.

No one can ever create art, even on a piece of paper, as they have envisioned it in their mind.

I can't always reach the image in my mind... almost never, in fact... so that the abstract image I create is not quite there, but it gets to the point where I can leave it.

I am, myself, a very poor visualizer and find that I can seldom call to mind even a single letter of the alphabet in purely retinal terms. I must trace the letter by running my mental eye over its contour in order that the image of it shall leave any distinctness at all.

If you want to do something you have to imagine it. If you don’t imagine it, it will never happen

It's hard to visualize James Bond without seeing one of the actors who played him. And it's hard to visualize Harry Potter without seeing Daniel Radcliffe. A movie is so visually powerful, so overwhelming, that it tends to crowd out how you might have imagined things.

I like visual imagery in my head.

Look around less, imagine more.

Visualization. It may be the most important part of your mental package.

If I sit and daydream, the images rush by like a succession of colored slides.

There's a secret that real writers know that wannabe writers don't, and the secret is this: It's not the writing part that's hard. What's hard is sitting down to write. What keeps us from sitting down is Resistance.

I daydream too. I visualise. I think ahead, I can do it now, sitting here. I think ahead to the walk-in, I can hear the crowd, the music, I can feel the cameras all around me, I can feel movements in my body as I am heading there, I can bring up that incredible feeling you get when you step into the cage.

I found that many gifted people are so afraid of writing a poor story that they cannot summon the nerve to write a single sentence for months. The thing to say to such people is: "See how *bad* a story you can write. See how dull you can be. Go ahead. That would be fun and interesting. I will give you ten dollars if you can write something thoroughly dull from beginning to end!" And of course, no one can.

That afternoon he told me that the difference between human beings and animals was that human beings were able to dream while awake. He said the purpose of books was to permit us to exercise that faculty. Art, he said, was a controlled madness… He said books weren't made of themes, which you could write essays about, but of images that inserted themselves into your brain and replaced what you were seeing with your eyes.

I've never really had much of an imagination. But still I would try to picture the exact moment when the beating of my heart would no longer be going on inside my head.

I can imagine many things, but few clearly.

Imagining something is better than remembering something.

There were moments - I would be daydreaming - I would imagine scenes, even if there wasn't a camera around. In my head, I was acting.

To visualize an image (in whole or in part) is to see clearly in the mind prior to exposure, a continuous projection from composing the image through the final print.