Young black men are guilty of criminal behavior not because of the alleged crimes they might commit but because they are the product of a collective imagination paralyzed by the racism of a white supremacist culture they can only view them as a dangerous nightmare.
America gave the world the notion of the melting pot - an alchemical cooking device wherein diverse ethnic and religious groups voluntarily mix together, producing a new, American identity. And while critics may argue that the melting pot is a national myth, it has tenaciously informed the America's collective imagination.
Dollar bills have absolutely no value except in our collective imagination, but everybody believes in the dollar bill.
The truly unique trait of 'Sapiens' is our ability to create and believe fiction. All other animals use their communication system to describe reality. We use our communication system to create new realities. Of course, not all fictions are shared by all humans, but at least one has become universal in our world, and this is money.
I love storytelling, you know, beyond anything. I love a great story beyond a great performance. Storytelling is about what we all do together and how we collaborate together. A performance can be a collaboration in ways, but oftentimes it's one individual thing.
Theatre is about the collective imagination... Everything I use on-stage is driven by the subject matter and what you might call the text - but that text can be anything, from a fragment of movement or music to something you see on a TV.
Some of my ideas for film or theater come to me in dreams. I'm also very creative when I'm talking to others. I believe in collaboration.
I am fascinated by these ocean-grown folks. On the coast, there's all this cross-pollination of ideas. Someone thinks they saw something. One person's madness is reiterated by another, and a story is born. The rumour becomes a substitute for news.
The Ireland I now inhabit is one that these Irish contemporaries have helped to imagine.
The meaning of a theater event is that none of us could see something so clearly as with the new energy that is brought with the meeting of a theme, actors living it, and an audience gradually entering it to live it with them. At that moment, a certain light appears, revealing what we would never have thought of on our own.
History often resembles myth, because they are both ultimately of the same stuff.
The human world is made of stories, not people.
It is probable that the principal credit of miracles, visions, enchantments, and such extraordinary occurrences comes from the power of imagination, acting principally upon the minds of the common people, which are softer.
The greatest thrill is that moment when a thousand people are sitting in the dark, looking at the same scene, and they are all apprehending something that has not been spoken. That's the thrill of it, the miracle - that's what holds us to movies forever. It's what we wish we could do in real life.
A child's own story is a dream, but a good story is a dream that is true for more than one child.
In the end, the key ingredient for public life is imagination. You imagine something better, you try to bring the people with you.
A myth is more powerful - and more lasting - than reality.
We dreamed together of the world remade.
The thing I find really special in performance is that there is this slightly mystical thing that takes over when you're responding to a crowd and engaging in people's imaginations collectively in a room. I've always thought that one of the most incredible things about being alive is going to see some kind of performance like that.
The nose of a mob is its imagination. By this, at any time, it can be quietly led.
America is the world's living myth. There's no sense of wrong when you kill an American or blame America for some local disaster. This is our function, to be character types, to embody recurring themes that people can use to comfort themselves, justify themselves and so on. We're here to accommodate. Whatever people need, we provide. A myth is a useful thing.
To accept your country without betraying it, you must love it for that which shows what it might become. America -- this monument to the genius of ordinary men and women, this place where hope becomes capacity, this long, halting turn of 'no' into the 'yes' -- needs citizens who love it enough to re-imagine and re-make it.
We are the movies and the movies are us.
Without myth, however, every culture loses its healthy creative natural power: it is only a horizon encompassed with myth that rounds off to unity a social movement.
Myth is supposed to bring us together, but fantasy alienates us.
