Mohsin Hamid Quotes

It is on these (20min) walks that my best ideas come to me. It is while walking that difficult clarity emerges. It is while walking that I experience a sense of well-being and connection, and it is in walking that I live most prayerfully.

I have a notebook with me all the time, and I begin scribbling a few words. When things are going well, the walk does not get anywhere; I finally just stop and write.

A sedentary life is the real sin against the Holy Spirit. Only those thoughts that come by walking have any value.

I try to do a lot of yoga and meditation. I think now it's creating things in times of waiting.

Ideas come as you walk, Nietzsche said. Walking dissipates thoughts, Shankara taught.

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

The brilliant thing about swimming is that, while you're doing it, there's nothing else you could be getting on with, like the ironing or sorting out the children. My mind goes into free-float mode; some of the best ideas for plots come into my head while I'm ploughing up and down the pool.

I guess I started running when I was about 18 and... I feel like it assists my creativity a bit because it completely just flushes everything out.

I do find walking is fundamental to my creative process.

Writing is a sedentary gig unless one has a treadmill desk. But I have long believed writing and working out are complementary disciplines.

Doing something that's physical but not necessarily mentally taxing - for me, it frees me up creatively.

For me, it's about eating a bunch of fruit and exercising, which opens up the creativity, makes it easier to give ideas a chance and bubble to the surface. I'm no angel, but it helps me, as does hiking, heading to the ocean to catch some waves - for me, sweating it out is definitely good for the creative process.

There is nothing a good long walk can't help work out.

Next to Morning Pages and Artist Dates, the most potent tool for contacting inner guidance and creativity is walking.

Sleeping is the height of genius

I live alone in a house, so for me it's very good to just be able to re-charge and just disappear and escape from reality and that's usually when I write most of my lyrics and my songs. It's a very happy productive place.

I'm amazed at how much my writing is improved when I step away from the computer, even in small amounts. If I'm stuck, I vacuum the living room or walk the dog. I'm amazed at what comes out of that... We have to realize that part of the writing life where we're sitting down at the computer is harvesting the crops, but you have to have planted them and watered them and created fertile soil - and that's a life.

To create well I have to be in a good mood, happy and cool.

A lot of times, some of my best ideas happen when I'm running. That's when I do my best thinking.

Writing crystallizes thought and thought produces action.

I can only do really serious writing for a couple of hours. And then I always go on a walk. I do a one-to-two-hour walk; I don't go running or hard hiking.

I love doing yoga and also enjoy going for regular walks.

You have to allow a certain amount of time in which you are doing nothing in order to have things occur to you, to let your mind think.

When you wake up, instead of checking emails on your phone, or counting your retweets, pick up a pen and scratch a few sentences into a notebook.

I do some of my best thinking while pulling weeds.