Joseph Wood Krutch Quotes

Sleeping is the height of genius

Take naps. Often new ideas come together when you are half asleep, but you have to train yourself to remember them.

I think walking is very useful, like sleeping and dreaming, as something that's important to my ability to write.

A nap is not to be confused with sleeping. We sleep to recharge our bodies. We nap to care for our souls. When we nap, we are resting our eyes while our imaginations soar. Getting ready for the next round. Sorting, sifting, separating the profound from the profane, the possible from the improbable. Rehearsing our acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize, our surprise on receiving the MacArthur genius award. This requires a prone position. If we're lucky, we might drift off, but we won't drift far. Just far enough to ransom our creativity from chaos.

I love to travel. During normal workdays, sometimes it feels like I have to bludgeon ideas out of my soul - but when I'm traveling, relaxed and unpressured, the ideas just spill out.

I have more ideas than I'll ever be able to write in five lifetimes.

Boredom always precedes a period of great creativity.

At midnight every night, I would methodically leave the house for a couple hours' walk, come back in, and record. And then the sun came up. If I had done something good, then I'd be happy and go to sleep.

If you want creative workers, give them enough time to play.

Being lazy does not mean that you do not create. In fact, lying around doing nothing is an important, nay crucial, part of the creative process. It is meaningless bustle that actually gets in the way of productivity. All we are really saying is, give peace a chance.

I go to bed late. My mind starts going at night - that's when those creative juices begin flowing.

For most people, creativity is a serious business. They forget the telling phrase 'the play of ideas' and think that they need to knuckle down and work more. Often, the reverse is true. They need to play.

I have the infinite galaxy from '2001' as my screensaver - so if I space out while I'm writing and it goes to screensaver, I can just stare off into the stars.

I've got more ideas for books than I'll ever be able to use in my lifetime. I'm very fortunate like that.

I could fall asleep at 10:30 watching 'Hill Street Blues.' I might wake up at 1 A.M. and have a riff in my head.

I get my best ideas in that state of suspended consciousness just before sleep.

Personally, I've got too many ideas to use in my lifetime, probably. But that's a nice problem to have, I think.

A novel is what you dream in your night sleep. A novel is not waking thoughts although it is written and thought with waking thoughts.

I wake up with new dreams every day...more I can do to channel that into things that I love to create is healthier for me and probably for everybody around me.

In producers, loafing is productive; and no creator, of whatever magnitude, has ever been able to skip that stage, any more than a mother can skip gestation.

Downtime is where we become ourselves, looking into the middle distance, kicking at the curb, lying on the grass or sitting on the stoop and staring at the tedious blue of the summer sky. I don't believe you can write poetry, or compose music, or become an actor without downtime, and plenty of it, a hiatus that passes for boredom but is really the quiet moving of the wheels inside that fuel creativity.

Sometimes, you see folks who have a negative view of dreamers - people who sit around all day on their hindquarters and do absolutely nothing. These folks aren't dreamers - they are just lazy. To me, dreaming is just part of being alive, inspired, and curious about the world.

I know it's easy to imagine, But it's easier to just do, See, if you can't do what you imagine, then what is imagination to you?

The importance of reading, for me, is that it allows you to dream.

We are all geniuses when we dream.