Francois de La Rochefoucauld Quotes

Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn't really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That's because they were able to connect experiences they've had and synthesize new things.

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

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

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.

When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn't really do it, they just saw something.

Usually my 'a-ha' moments are when I'm not trying to think of how to solve a particular problem.

Sometimes the best ideas I have are in my bathtub or in my bed or in my dreams early in the morning before waking up ... I'm like a TV antennae, I catch it all and do it my way.

There is no prescribed route to follow to arrive at a new idea. You have to make the intuitive leap.

As soon as your mind knows that it's on and it's supposed to produce some lines, either it doesn't or it produces things that are very predictable. And that's why I say I'm not interested in writing something that I thought about. I'm interested in discovering where my mind wants to go, or what object it wants to pick up.

The mind does most of its best thinking when we aren't there. The answers are there in the morning.

I don't really know why an idea comes to me. But all of a sudden, an idea comes and from experience I can intuit what something means when an interesting line pops up. Or I can intuit what an interesting choice might be. And I can try a couple of different choices, and see which one feels right, and then continue the song to see where it goes.

An idea, to be suggestive, must come to the individual with the force of revelation.

To me, the question of inspiration is an exercise in hindsight. The truth is, inspiration is mysterious at the time. I don't think it's ever a rational process.

It is the function of creative man to perceive and to connect the seemingly unconnected.

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

One's mind has a way of making itself up in the background, and it suddenly becomes clear what one means to do.

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.

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.

To see things in the seed, that is genius.

I do not 'get' ideas; ideas get me.

The thing that I was brought up to prize above everything else is the intellect. There is no problem that the intellect cannot solve, but it never had an original thought. Originality is the realm of the unconscious.

I don't know how to explain it, but when you're working on something constantly, and you're digging in deep, things kind of fall in, and you grab them, and you're like, 'That one!' and 'That thing!' and it starts to build something right.

You can't rush inspiration.

When writing 'Give and Take' and 'Originals,' the predominant emotion for me was curiosity.

Invention is activity of mind, as fire is air in motion; a sharpening of the spiritual sight, to discern hidden aptitudes.