#Ideas

"88. People wonder why so many writers come to live in Paris. I’ve been living ten years in Paris and the answer seems simple to me: because it’s the best place to pick ideas. Just like Italy, Spain.. or Iran are the best places to pick saffron. If you want to pick opium poppies you go to Burma or South-East Asia. And if you want to pick novel ideas, you go to Paris."

"You grow ravenous. You run fevers. You know exhilarations. You can't sleep at night, because your beast-creature ideas want out and turn you in your bed. It is a grand way to live."

"Some of the most polished ideas are discovered through healthy, honest debate, so if you don't argue with yourself every once in a while, other people will gladly point out that you missed a spot."

"Your thoughts carry you wherever you want to go. Weak thoughts don’t have the energy to carry you far!"

"In motivating people, you've got to engage their minds and their hearts. I motivate people, I hope, by example - and perhaps by excitement, by having productive ideas to make others feel involved."

"There has always been this narrator in me - I loved ideas, and part of the great love affair I would have with ideas consisted of talking about them."

"We go through the whole season working on next season's car and developing the car and making sure we fit in the car and all that sort of stuff. And we obviously give ideas of what we would hope next year's car would have even if it's small things like buttons on the steering wheel and different positions and whatever."

"I read anything that’s going to be interesting. But you don’t know what it is until you’ve read it. Somewhere in a book on the history of false teeth there’ll be the making of a novel."

"There are a thousand thoughts lying within a man that he does not know till he takes up the pen to write."

"A lot of times when you're making a record, you put your head down and charge forward until you're done. You just hope that the ideas hold up, because you're kind of lost in your own storm."

"I can't understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I'm frightened of the old ones."

"When a reader falls in love with a book, it leaves its essence inside him, like radioactive fallout in an arable field, and after that there are certain crops that will no longer grow in him, while other, stranger, more fantastic growths may occasionally be produced."[Books vs. Goons, L.A. Times, April 24, 2005]"

"Always carry a notebook. And I mean always. The short-term memory only retains information for three minutes; unless it is committed to paper you can lose an idea for ever."