John Cleese Quotes

there is no prescribed route to follow to arrive at a new idea. You have to make the intuitive leap. But the difference is that once you've made the intuitive leap you have to justify it by filling in the intermediate steps. N my case, it often happens that I have an idea, but then I try to fill in the intermediate steps and find that they don't work, so I have to give it up.

Creativity is just connecting things.

Creative ideas aren't like Jenga blocks, where they fall apart and you've got to start from scratch, though it can feel that way.

The technical process which is interesting in it's own right but I think the creative process is what's more intriguing to me.

Once I can focus in on something, I just play it in my mind until an idea comes from out of nowhere, and it's usually the key to the whole song. It's the idea that matters. It's like electricity was around long before Edison harnessed it.

It appeared that after first contemplating a book on some subject, and after giving serious preliminary attention to it, I needed a period of subconscious incubation which could not be hurried and was if anything impeded by deliberate thinking.... Having, by a time of very intense concentration, planted the problem in my subconsciousness, it would germinate underground until, suddenly, the solution emerged with a blinding clarity, so that it only remained to write down what happened as if in a revelation.

You have to have a lot of ideas. First, if you want to make discoveries, it's a good thing to have good ideas. And second, you have to have a sort of sixth sense-the result of judgment and experience-which ideas are worth following up. I seem to have the first thing, a lot of ideas, and I also seem to have good judgment as to which are the bad ideas that I should just ignore, and the good ones, that I'd better follow up.

Creativity is more about taking the facts, fictions, and feelings we store away and finding new ways to connect them.

Creativity is a process more often than it is an event.

Genius is rarely able to give any account of its own processes.

Creativity comes from a conflict of ideas.

The creative process is mysterious; a conversation, a ride in the car, or a melody can trigger something.

I think that everything is part of creativity - the more you create, the more you have ideas, and the more you meet people.

My ideas tend to arise out of nowhere when I'm not intentionally trying to think of something.

Creativity requires input, and that's what research is. You're gathering material with which to build.

I like to start with the ordinary, and then nudge it, and then think, 'What happens next, what happens next?'

It's not enough to tell people to be creative; they need to know how, and what to create.

Rational thoughts never drive people's creativity the way emotions do.

The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources.

I almost literally wake up in the morning starting to think of my next idea. It's almost always driven by what's in the news. The hard part, really, is getting from knowing what I want to say to figuring out how to say it in an image. I'm still not entirely sure how to explain how that happens... Suddenly, something just works.

What I love about the creative process, and this may sound naive, but it is this idea that one day there is no idea, and no solution, but the next day there is an idea. I find that incredibly exciting and conceptually actually remarkable.

Coming up with ideas is really hard - they don't spontaneously pop into my head while I'm cutting vegetables.

In school, when I got into upper-level math, there would be times when I would wake up from a dream and have - not an answer, exactly, but a direction to pursue. My writing has always been like that. I wake up from dreams knowing which direction to go in.

Creativity is the power to connect the seemingly unconnected.

Creativity makes a leap, then looks to see where it is.