Robert Frost Quotes

For the birth of something new, there has to be a happening. Newton saw an apple fall; James Watt watched a kettle boil; Roentgen fogged some photographic plates. And these people knew enough to translate ordinary happenings into something new.

I don't do a lot of research, exactly, but I'm constantly wandering through the world finding things incredible and remembering them.

I enjoy looking beyond the obvious and look at the stories happening all around me - you kind of formulate things in your mind and get excited about them.

You can find inspiration when you're not even looking for it.

I don't really know what I want, other than good sequences, whatever that means. What I find is always a matter of chance, judgment, and luck.

A lot of times, you're circling around a lot of things, and then you find that one person, or that little piece of dialogue, and it doesn't always have to be in person.

Chance favors the connected mind.

I never look for a photograph. The photograph finds me and says, I'm here! and I say, Yes, I see you. I hear you.

The moment of truth, the sudden emergence of a new insight, is an act of intuition. Such intuitions give the appearance of miraculous flushes, or short-circuits of reasoning. In fact they may be likened to an immersed chain, of which only the beginning and the end are visible above the surface of consciousness. The diver vanishes at one end of the chain and comes up at the other end, guided by invisible links.

A discovery is said to be an accident meeting a prepared mind.

Taking time to sit back and watch and think about what you've seen is important. Traveling did a great deal to me. I found that when I travel and just sit in the corner and watch, a million ideas come to me.

A single idea, if it is right, saves us the labor of an infinity of experiences.

In fact, I don't think I'll ever make anything that will feel as divinely dropped in my lap as the opening of 'Wall-E.'

I'm not smart, but I like to observe. Millions saw the apple fall, but Newton was the one who asked why.

What Romantic terminology called genius or talent or inspiration is nothing other than finding the right road empirically, following one's nose, taking shortcuts.

What is a scientist after all? It is a curious man looking through a keyhole, the keyhole of nature, trying to know what's going on.

Every time I write a song I feel really lucky and kind of surprised. Not surprised that I wrote it, but just surprised that things exist that you don't know about.

All good ideas arrive by chance.

I sometimes don't try to invent something. I wait for some kind of a direction - and it happens. I get an angle, for instance, and it just appears, and I say, 'Oh my God - that's it!'

Make visible what, without you, might perhaps never have been seen.

Sometimes ideas feel like they were already there, and that you're just discovering them.

I'm actually a very lazy person. Most of the time, I'm happy to sit around and stare. Or watch bad TV soaps. It's quite rare for me to get inspired by anything, but it could be something small. A view of the Serpentine. A snatch of music. Or a little shred of conversation overheard on a bus, such as, 'You also will marry someone of my choice.'

My insights come in periods of working. There are wonderful moments of surprise, but I'm superstitious enough not to want to talk about them.

Every great inspiration is but an experiment - though every experiment we know, is not a great inspiration.

Most of my advances were by mistake. You uncover what is when you get rid of what isn't.