Genius ain't anything more than elegant common sense.

I'm an optimist in the sense that I believe humans are noble and honorable and some of them are really smart. I have a very optimistic view of individuals.

Common sense is genius dressed in its working clothes.

Common sense is not so common.

Poetry proceeds from the totality of man sense imagination intellect love desire instinct blood and spirit together.

Imagination it turns out is a great deal like reporting in your own head. Here is a paradox of fiction-writing. You are crafting something from nothing which means in one sense that none of it is true. Yet in the writing and perhaps in the reading some of a character's actions or lines are truer than others.

To put down an ideogram of a table so that people will recognize it as a table is not the work of a painter but to sense it for a moment as a magic carpet with a leg hanging down at each corner is the beginning of a painter's imagination.

Even the highest forms of sacrificial worship present much that is repulsive to modern ideas and in particular it requires an effort to reconcile our imagination to the bloody ritual which is prominent in almost every religion which has a strong sense of sin.

For some reason I can't explain artist and musicians tend to look younger than our age. Being in music you need this youthful sense of discovery and wonder for what you're doing and keep your imagination open. That's a youthful way of looking at life and I think that reflects in how you age.

Ellis Peters's historical detail is very accurate and very minute and therefore is not only interesting to read but good for an actor to acquire a sense of the period. And the other thing I think is that an actor lives in the land of imagination.

My books are elegiac in the sense that they're odes to a nation that even I sometimes think may not exist anymore except in my memory and my imagination.

One longs for a director with a sense of imagination.

He is the true enchanter whose spell operates not upon the senses but upon the imagination and the heart.

Memories imagination old sentiments and associations are more readily reached through the sense of smell than through any other channel.

Falling in love consists merely in uncorking the imagination and bottling the common sense.

I like nonsense it wakes up the brain cells. Fantasy is a necessary ingredient in living it's a way of looking at life through the wrong end of a telescope. Which is what I do and that enables you to laugh at life's realities.

I think superheroes are heroes with flaws and in their flaws there is a sense of humor.

I liked the premise of this material. I love the marriage relationship. They kind of keep each other honest and they enjoy each other's sense of humor. Kind of a sexy but boring relationship.

Certainly anyone whom I've witnessed who has gone through something horrible and life-changing has a sense of ironic humor or an ability to look at the peculiarities of the world and find humor in it.

While many of us never knew Ronald Reagan personally we felt close to him because we shared his lighthearted sense of humor admired his uncommon virtue and were moved by his remarkable wisdom.

Nothing in man is more serious than his sense of humor it is the sign that he wants all the truth.

I love a girl with a sense of humor. Someone who can make me laugh and that I can get along with and talk with and who is just sweet overall inside and out.

I think my sense of humor is Jewish. I'm smarter than most white people which is kind of a Jewish thing too.

People ask me what the most important thing to take on the race is and I always say it's a sense of humor. If you've got nothing but a sense of humor you will survive.