"I think extravagance in your life takes the energy from possible extravagances in your mind."

"Today, more than ever, we need imagination and ideas."

"We write from our obsessions, and often they involve memories of incidents and people that we've never quite been able to resolve in any sort of satisfactory way.  These moments linger like the pea under the mattress that disturbed the princess's sleep, or the splinter under the skin that's sore when we touch it."

"The Professional writer, whether consciously or subconsciously, knows exactly where his idea sits on the Literary and Commercial spectrum long before he starts to work."

"Art does NOT come from the mind.  It does not come from your rational, analytical faculties.  It does not come from ideas.  It does not come from theories.  It does not come from philosophies.  You don't write a book in order to express a theme or make symbols.  That's NOT the process."

"We are writers, and we never ask one another where we get our ideas; we know we don't know."

"The only places I feel most at home in, exist in my 'portable world'; those democratic spaces where my kith and kin from the Republics of Imagination and Ideas reside."

"The ingredients for making a successful work to me are imagination, idea, composition, skill and dedication."

"It's important to feed your mind with quality information daily. Only then is it possible to come up with great book ideas."

"Stay curious, look for inspiration in everything, and write it down.  You never know when you have a seed that you'll come back to."

"Be true to yourself. Find your own voice and be true to that voice. Never take a bad idea, but never turn down a good idea. And, of course, have final cut."

"The 'how' of what that process is down there, I have no idea.  All I know is that characters keep emerging, voices keep speaking to me, and I keep writing them down."

"I think that ideas exist outside of ourselves. I think somewhere, we're all connected off in some very abstract land. But somewhere between there and here ideas exist. And I think the mind isn't conscious enough to go all the way to where we're connected, but it's conscious of a certain amount of that territory. And when these ideas fly into the conscious part, then you can capture them. But if they're outside of the conscious part, you don't even know about them. So you just hope that you can make the conscious part of your mind bigger or that these ideas will fly into your airspace, so you can shoot them down and grab them and take them home. So that's all you try to do. Sometimes an idea will strike you when you're sitting in a quiet chair. But sometimes an idea will strike you when you're standing. Sometimes music will also help you. If I thought I could just sit still in a quiet place and get ideas, I would do that all the time, but sometimes nothing happens. There's no rhyme or reason to it. But you've got to write them down right away. I forget so many things. Then if I forget it and try to remember it, my whole day is ruined because I can't remember and I feel horrible. And I imagine that it was one of the all time great ideas. And it probably isn't."

"Want to come up with great book ideas? Looking to improve your writing skills? Hoping to turn your writing into a profitable business? Then be a reader!"

"It's always about execution. If I told you that I was going to write a story about a man who wakes up and finds he has turned into a beetle, there's a good chance you'd think it was a stupid idea. But Kafka has the power to make that not only a good story, but one that's actually shaped the way we think about short stories. ... Part of the answer is something about conviction, something about summoning the authority."

"The same way that a photographer is not fully conscious of why she snaps the picture, there is a similar experience for writers. We are attempting to capture something on the page, a fleeting thought, an experience that we can not quite articulate, an idea that we do not quite understand, and by placing these moments in the context of a story, these experiences can be transmitted to our reader as something larger than we are, something beyond our limited understanding."

"Call it whatever you like—spirit, soul, psyche, personality, ego, unified field, inner being.  It is somewhere intangible, not physical, from whence these creations come.  Yet, by being put down on paper—letters into words, words into paragraphs, paragraphs into an essay—they join the physical realm."

"I believe that it is difficult to kill an idea because ideas are invisible and contagious, and they move fast."

"I see a lot of people who want the things that come along with being a musician or artist, but don't know what they actually want to represent.  When you don't have a vision for what you want to put out there, it can lead to being influenced by those around you.  Everyone is going to have an opinion and give you advice and tell you how to do things.  But if you really want to do your thing and be successful doing something that's unique to you, then you need to have a clear idea of what you want.  You will be influenced by others, but you should have the strongest sense of what you're putting out there."

"The movies have not undermined the influence of fiction.  On the contrary, they have extended its field, carrying the ideas which are already current among readers to those too young, too impatient, or too uneducated to read."

"As soon as things get difficult, I walk away.  That's the great secret of creativity.  You treat ideas like cats: you make them follow you.  If you try to approach a cat and pick it up, hell, it won't let you do it.  You've got to say, 'Well, to hell with you.'  And the cat says, 'Wait a minute.  He's not behaving the way most humans do.'  Then the cat follows you out of curiosity: 'Well, what's wrong with you that you don't love me?'  Well, that's what an idea is.  See?  You just say, 'Well, hell, I don't need depression.  I don't need worry.  I don't need to push.'  The ideas will follow me.  When they're off-guard, and ready to be born, I'll turn around and grab them."

"I waited until I had an idea for a novel that I completely loved, and then wrote it.  My enthusiasm is what helped me get through the whole process—including finding an agent."

"I believe that in the battle between guns and ideas, ideas will, eventually, win."

"People think you make the gold of your poem out of nothing like Midas or something, but you don't.  You make the gold of your poem out of the seams of ore that you find."

"I now have a better understanding of how to communicate my ideas, but I still struggle every single day.  As soon as I stop struggling, I'll be dead."

"Every idea that you fall in love with is a gift. How the ideas come is the trick."

"There are broadly two ways to approach any piece of writing, in my opinion. One is where you have an idea of where the whole thing is heading ... The other is where you have a phrase, an image, maybe a single line that fascinates you and provokes you into elaborating it."

"If you want to write believable fiction, you will have to cross over the line of your self-restraint and revel in the words and ideas that you would never express in your everyday life."

"What we all have in us ... t it has always been there, and so few of us bother to notice.  When people ask me where I get my ideas, I laugh.  How strange—we're so busy looking out, to find ways and means, we forget to look in.  The Muse, to belabor the point then, is there, a fantastic storehouse, our complete being.  All that is most original lies waiting for us to summon it forth."

"One day, I had a great idea for a mystery.  I knew it was a good idea; I got goosebumps and became obsessed.  I announced to my husband, 'I'm going to write a mystery.'  He was sweetly skeptical, but supportive, and I was naively compelled to write it.  I had no idea what I was doing, but I thought—I've read a million mysteries!  I'll learn.  I was 55 years old, and that book turned out to be Prime Time, which won the Agatha for Best First Novel."

"I write things down as I go along and keep it in a notebook and I know when I have enough words gathered for a poem.  It is like harvesting."

"The happy writer is an open writer: open to experiences, emotions, words, ideas, books, authors, tastes, smells, films, travel."

"My ideas drove me to it, you see.  The more I did, the more I wanted to do.  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."

"I did this book Different Seasons, they were stories that I had written like I write all of them, I get this idea, and I want to write this."

"Time-based work doesn't make as much sense as it once did, as ideas are not 'things' and can't be measured in units. An idea, conceived in just a moment, can have enormous implications. Thus an 'idea person' has a more flexible approach to time. She learns how to develop the special, and often quite eccentric, circumstances that encourage creativity, and to trust inspiration when it appears—no matter what the time. "

"I believe that repressing ideas spreads ideas."

Worlds of Wonder

"Literature—language, fiction—does not as a medium force you to leave your ideas behind. And if you think it into being, if you will a story into being, by God, it's going to show."

"Sometimes inspiration strikes and we sit down to write. But a writer knows the reverse is more common. We start to write and the ideas come."

"Cities are not people. But, like people, cities have their own personalities ... A city is a collection of lives and buildings, and it has identity and personality. Cities exist in location, and in time. ... There are good cities—the ones that welcome you, that seem to care about you, that seem pleased you’re in them. There are indifferent cities—the ones that honestly don't care if you're there or not; cities with their own agendas, the ones that ignore people. There are cities gone bad, and there are places in otherwise healthy cities as rotten and maggoty as windfall apples. There are even cities that seem lost—some, lacking a center, feel like they would be happier being elsewhere, somewhere smaller, somewhere easier to understand. Some cities spread, like cancers or B-movie slime monsters, devouring all in their way, absorbing towns and villages, swallowing boroughs and hamlets, transmuting into boundless conurbations. Other cities shrink—once prosperous areas empty and fail: buildings empty, windows are boarded up, people leave, and sometimes they cannot even tell you why. ... Don't ever take a city for granted. After all, it is bigger than you are; it is older; and it has learned how to wait." (artist)

"The artistic medium of fiction writers—language—is not innately sensual. The medium is unforgiving whenever we look for it in our minds. Some visual artists do a lot of conceptualizing and still end up creating terrific works of art. They are able to do so because once they get out there in front of their canvases or their blocks of granite, they have to leave those ideas behind. The medium itself won't let them think."

Ray Bradbury - "Telling the Truth"

"Readability ... when you encounter it, it's as obvious and recognizable as a mountain. ... It's a way of writing.  It's sentence structure, the balance between show and tell, the balance between prose and dialogue, the balance between narration and interior monologue, the balance between ideas and action, and many other things."

"What great writers do is practice the art of looking for the Undiscovered Countries inside every story—because every book ever written is just a torch being carried into an incredibly deep, incredibly dark cavern of the imagination, illuminating only a small portion of the potential ideas it contains.  What remains hidden in the shadows is a rich source of inspiration for your own work—if you know how to mine it."

"Writers seeking to break in are often so concerned with sounding salable that they put it before craft.  It's off-putting.  The more the writer seems focused on selling, the less genuine the craft tends to be.  Talk to me about your ideas, your characters, your worlds: That's how to excite me."

"I want anyone who has ever had an idea shot down by a supposed authority to take heed.  I have to say, my gasted is totally flabbered that anyone would dissuade a student from pursuing something based on an idea alone."

"You must know thrilling things before you can write about them. Imagination alone isn't enough, but stories you hear from friends or read in the papers can be built up by a fertile imagination and a certain amount of research and documentation into incidents that will also ring true in fiction."

"Listen to the story being told.  Come up with the idea, but let it play out naturally.  Try not to shape it word for word or be so married to an outline that you deny what could become something amazing."

"You're doing what you want to do because you're curious about that idea.  My motivation for writing has always been curiosity.  I prefer to write about things that I know a little about, but not a whole lot about."

"You write and you write and you write in this business, but every now and then you come up with—I think it's the magical part of the process—an idea that is either exceptionally fresh or good."

"If I can have one good idea, I can have another.  Ideas are cheap.  It's good execution that's expensive."

"I start with almost nothing: A question I want asked, or a feeling, a sort of weird conflicted feeling that I have and I want to explore.  So I think all my books start that way.  And then, as it always does, the book takes on a life of its own."

"I've always preferred an auteur approach and not a committee approach. Nothing wrong with it—nothing wrong with a committee—but it doesn't interest me. I like to have the ideas.  Nothing excites me as much as an idea popping in my head.  It's the only thing left that gives me an adrenaline rush. This is my extreme sport."

"It's not the idea, it's never the idea, it's always what you do with it."

"As long as I can get exactly what's in my head with minimum compromise, I don't care where it's going. I don't care if, in five years' time, they've discovered telepathy, that I can just have ideas and blink and people get them all around the world. You know, we don't know what the medium's going to be, so I'll have whatever delivers the purest idea that I have to the most people."

"Curiosity creates a sort of brain vortex that sucks in whatever you feel most motivated to learn, along with ideas that may be floating around your environment.  The spark of curiosity lights up the hippocampus (where the creation of memories occurs), and the reward and pleasure brain circuits, which release dopamine.  So if you want an alert brain, start your day by immersing yourself in something you find fascinating and mysterious.  Pique your curiosity, enjoy the natural high and learn something new."

"Please get out of the habit of saying that you’ve got an idea for a short story. Art does not come from ideas. Art does not come from the mind. Art comes from the place where you dream. Art comes from your unconscious; it comes from the white-hot center of you."

"Breaks give your mind a chance to refresh.  I write multiple books at once, and I'm always thinking about them, even if I'm not at a computer.  It's a habit I picked up as a litigator: You have 1,000 facts in your head, and the most important thing isn't that you know them all- it's that you crystallize them, so that you can present them clearly.  Epiphanies don't occur like a spark; they're actually ideas that have been floating around in your brain for a while.  By the time I sit down to write, my thoughts are well organized and come out cleanly."

"I always start out with an idea, even a boring idea, that becomes a question I don't have answers to."

"I don't think we should discuss ideas.  I think we should just write, and then go in with the book and say, 'here's the book.'  Now, sometimes you have to say something.  But I wouldn't listen to what they say back—because they're not prophets. ... Agents particularly are really not in the business of being prophetic.  They know what has worked, and that's it."

"Think of how a movie starts out.  It's a baby.  It's like the fetus of a movie star; we all start out ugly.  Every one of Pixar's stories starts out that way.  A new thing is hard to define; it's not attractive, and it requires protection. ... Every new idea in any field needs protection.  Pixar is set up to protect our director's ugly baby.  Of course you can't protect the baby forever.  At some point, it has to grow up and change into something, because the beast is still there.  That's a positive thing.  Because sometimes the ugly baby would rather play in the sandbox forever.  It's a lot like raising a kid.  It's complex and interesting.  But most people want to make it simpler than it is."

"You've got to protect your voice and your vision from everybody, really.  Even the best-intentioned editors.  And I mean, I love my editor; I've been with Vicky Wilson for over 35 years.  She's wonderful, and her remarks on the finished manuscript are always terrific.  But I don't go to her to discuss a germinating idea."