Childhood Imagination Quotes

I believe that maturity is not an outgrowing, but a growing up: that an adult is not a dead child, but a child who survived. I believe that all the best faculties of a mature human being exist in the child. . . that one of the most deeply human, and humane, of these faculties is the power of imagination.

I still find it quite easy to find my way into a child's imagination. We're all Peter Pan ourselves in some respects. Everybody should keep some grip on childhood, even as a grownup.

I think it's hard to write about children and to have an idea of innocence.

I was a shy kid with a broom handle that I pretended was a microphone.

For a time, I believed not in God nor Santa Claus, but in mermaids. They seemed as logical and possible to me as the brittle twig of a seahorse in the zoo aquarium or the skates lugged up on the lines of cursing Sunday fishermen - skates the shape of old pillowslips with the full, coy lips of women.

My dad says that when I was two or three I used to go out dressed as a different character every day. I remember thinking it was perfectly normal to wear different coloured shoes and carry a pink umbrella. But now I've got a goddaughter of that age; I realise it's not normal at all.

Growing up, I loved to play. Writing was a natural outtake of play. I realize now, having kids, that maybe that's unusual. Living out in the middle of nowhere, I entertained myself by writing.

I would play ball with Catherine, and hide and seek: Not a very challenging game in an open meadow, but she was still at the age where she believed that if she shut her eyes and buried her head under a shawl then she could not be seen.

Inside every adult there's still a child that lingers. We're happiness merchants - giving people the opportunity to dream like children.

I played pretend games as a kid, army, whatever, but I never wanted to be an actor.

When I was a kid, I had this idea that I would have a beard when I got older. I thought it'd be nice to rub my chin.

As a kid, when I got to the edge of a cliff I wanted to jump off. I didn't want to kill myself. I wanted to fly.

We need kids to remind us of how incredible this world is. People are increasingly losing their childhoods too soon, and that's a danger. There's a prophesy somewhere that at a certain point in history, children will be gray. It's weird to think about, but it's possible.

I think I've had the fantasy of a ray-gun that could erase the world from the time I was a very little kid.

When I was five years old, my parents gave me a magic chest. I learned to cast spells, although of a childish kind, before I had learned to read and write.

Every child is born blessed with a vivid imagination.

Every child is born blessed with a vivid imagination. But just as a muscle grows flabby with disuse, so the bright imagination of a child pales in later years if he ceases to exercise it.

When I was a really young child, I felt like I could see fairies. I was convinced there were fairies in my grandmother's garden.

If I tried to describe my personality, I'd start to gush about living by the ocean half my life and being brought up on 'Alice in Wonderland' and believing in magic for years and years.

I believe this passionately: that we don't grow into creativity, we grow out of it. Or rather, we get educated out if it.

When I was 8, I thought I was Harrison Ford, Gene Wilder, Richard Pryor, Elvis, and Chuck Norris all at once.

I had great memories as a child artist.

I didn't know anything about writers. It never occurred to me they were regular people and that I could grow up to become one, even though I loved to make up stories inside my head.

Everything when I was a kid was illustrated.

I think somewhere around high school, your brain starts to gel, to harden. Before that, there’s this time where anything is possible and the more things that you artistically and educationally have in your repertoire, the more you become a child of larger possibilities.