Simone de Beauvoir Quotes

When I get bored, I'll zone out, and I'll just sit in front of my computer and start writing any random song that comes to mind.

In idling, the motor's running, but you're letting your mind take in anything. Things pop into it. Those are the gifts of subterranean conscious.

You find there's no magic trick, sometimes in the shower, sometimes you're just lying in bed calm, sometimes you're just enjoying life and just have a notepad, it's never far away. Always have a notepad on you, because you never know what's going to happen, take a moment and write it down the minute that comes in your head. Even if you can't deal with it until later, I've had that experience where I was in a wedding party and I'm on stage, I'm like, "I hope I don't forget this, something just occurred to me."

The best ideas come unexpectedly from a conversation or a common activity like watering the garden. These can get lost or slip away if not acted on when they occur.

I long for a kind of quiet where I can just drift and dream. I always say getting inspiration is like fishing. If you're quiet and sitting there and you have the right bait, you're going to catch a fish eventually. Ideas are sort of like that. You never know when they're going to hit you.

The best way to write a song is to think of something else and then the song kind of creeps in. The beginning makes no sense whatsoever. It just, like, rhymes. And then all of a sudden I'll go into, I am an old woman named after my mother.

I have a basic indolence about me which is essential to writing. ... It's thinking time, it's hanging-out time, it's daydreaming time. You know, it's lie-around-the-bed time, it's sitting-like-a-dope-in-your-chair time. And that seems to me essential to any work.

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

Let's say I've directed that [writing] energy into writing my latest book but suddenly, I really want to write about an onion. I don't say to myself, "No, you have stay on the subject," because I know that the longer I stay on the subject the more boring I get. So, if my mind wants to write about an onion, it might be a deeper way to go into what I'm working on, even though it might seem irrelevant. This is how I've learned to follow my mind.

Writer advice... Write. Finish things. Go for walks. Read a lot & outside your comfort zone. Stay interested. Daydream. Write.

In the shower, with the hot water coming down, you've left the real world behind, and very frequently things open up for you. It's the change of venue, the unblocking the attempt to force the ideas that's crippling you when you're trying to write.

Some of the best ideas come sort of out of nowhere and when you're not expecting it.

When you drink coffee, you become very focused, and in fact, the key to creative genius is to be defocused.

You get all the puzzle parts together enough to say the puzzle is complete. It's a script. In the process of realizing that, new ideas can come, one way or another. Through a happy accident, they just come to you.

A thought falls like a ripe fruit from the tree of idleness.

Everything of mine is permeated with my love of ideas-both big and small. It doesn't matter what it is, as long as it grabs me and holds me, facinates me. And then I'll run out and something about it... I write for fun.

When you're home or you're working, your mind just isn't allowed to just roll on like it does when you're watching the scenery go by. You're hurdling through space but you're not really moving. ...It's that dreaminess, that ability to just get dreamy while you're looking out the window and you see something...and it makes you think of something else, and all of a sudden the words are just flowing out of you.

As a writer you ask yourself to dream while awake.

Loafing is the most productive part of a writer's life.

I never know when I sit down, just what I am going to write. I make no plan; it just comes, and I don't know where it comes from.

We figure to ourselves The thing we like; and then we build it up, As chance will have it, on the rock or sand,- For thought is tired of wandering o'er the world, And homebound Fancy runs her bark ashore.

I don't freestyle, but when I'm writing and thinking, sometimes things pop up - that's basically a freestyle.

Daydreaming had started me on the way; but story writing once I was truly in its grip, took me and shook me awake.

Idle dreaming is often of the essence of what we do.