#Ideas

"The great enemy of truth is very often not the lie--deliberate, contrived and dishonest--but the myth--persistent, persuasive and unrealistic. Too often we hold fast to the cliches of our forebears. We subject all facts to a prefabricated set of interpretations. We enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought.[Commencement Address at Yale University, June 11 1962]"

"You are an explorer, and you represent our species, and the greatest good you can do is to bring back a new idea, because our world is endangered by the absence of good ideas. Our world is in crisis because of the absence of consciousness."

"Real life is physical. Give me books instead. Give me the invisibility of the contents of books, the thoughts, the ideas, the images. Let me become part of a book. . . . an intertextual being: a book cyborg, or, considering that books aren't cybernetic, perhaps a bibliorg."

"Ideas shape the course of history."

"The lampshade on my head is for my bright ideas. I won't be able to convey them until Monday, when my curtain gets out of the dry cleaners."

"The best ideas will eat at you for days, maybe even weeks, until something, some incident, some impulse, triggers you to finally express them."

"I like the scientific spirit—the holding off, the being sure but not too sure, the willingness to surrender ideas when the evidence is against them: this is ultimately fine—it always keeps the way beyond open—always gives life, thought, affection, the whole man, a chance to try over again after a mistake—after a wrong guess."

"Ideas are easy. It's the execution of ideas that really separates the sheep from the goats."

"For books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a potency of life in them to be as active as that soul was whose progeny they are; nay, they do preserve as in a vial the purest efficacy and extraction of that living intellect that bred them."

"One question about a joke is, how well is the strangeness of the situation resolved? At 'The New Yorker', we retain a lot of incongruity, tapping the playful part of the mind - Monty Python-type stuff. We also try to use humor as a vehicle for communicating ideas. Not editorial comment, but observation."

"But that initial, comet-blazing-across-the-sky, Big Idea is only the beginning. Each book is composed of a mosaic of thousands of little ideas, ideas that invariably come to me at two in the morning when my alarm is set for seven."

"Most ideas are born and lost in isolation."

"Books are always obviously having conversations with other books, and some times they're amiable and sometimes not."

"A man may die, nations may rise and fall, but an idea lives on. Ideas have endurance without death.[Remarks Recorded for the Opening of a USIA Transmitter, February 8 1963]"

"Whenever I think of something but can't think of what it was I was thinking of, I can't stop thinking until I think I'm thinking of it again. I think I think too much."

"Behind this mask there is more than just flesh. Beneath this mask there is an idea... and ideas are bulletproof."

"I think of myself as a bad writer with big ideas, but I'd rather be that than a big writer with bad ideas."

"I think that perhaps if I had had to slow down the ideas so that I could capture them on paper I might have stifled some of them."

"The book is a film that takes place in the mind of the reader. That's why we go to movies and say, "Oh, the book is better."

"Painting is a nail to which I fasten my ideas."