The phrase "a lively imagination" is correct and usable in written English.
You can use it to describe someone who has a vivid and creative way of thinking, often producing original ideas or stories.
Example: "As a child, she was known for her lively imagination, often creating fantastical worlds in her drawings and stories."
Alternatives: "a vivid imagination" or "a creative mind".
He has a lively imagination.
But he also has a solid technique and a lively imagination.
That was in March and it would have taken a lively imagination to envisage sitting with Burke at a gleaming facility in Saxony six months later.
'At heart,' he confesses, 'I was an old-fashioned storyteller with a lively imagination.' This, perhaps, is the key to Ballard, an outcast of empire who found self-expression scavenging the fertile wasteland of 20th-century modernism.
He tells another close friend, Humbert Ferrand, what the symphony is about: "I conceive an artist, gifted with a lively imagination, who … sees for the first time a woman who realises the ideal of beauty and fascination that his heart has so long invoked, and falls madly in love with her.
Lacking a lively imagination we are unable to immerse ourselves in the delights of the arts.
"The Sign on Rosie's Door," a Sendak book published in 1960, begins with the dedication: Remembering Pearl Karchawer _ all the Rosies_ _ and Brooklyn._ Rosie is a girl with an unusually lively imagination, and she gets her friends who do indeed look like Jewish children on the streets of Brooklyn to take part in her fantasies.
From Merchant Taylors School in Crosby, in around 1943, Bainbridge's English report at least admits that "her written work is the product of an obviously lively imagination", although "it is a pity that her spelling derives from the same source".
These results confirm traditional literary criticism based on introspection which argues that detailed description of static objects elicits an especially lively imagination.
After a diversion via the lively imagination of the designer Umit Benan, it was back to the familiar guessing game: Were any pieces not made from animal skin?
And he has a lively, allusive imagination, not that you could tell from this installation.
