T. Boone Pickens Quotes

I'm always talking to people. It's not that complicated. I just find somebody and say, "Do you have any ideas." If they do, we just start thinking things around.

Sometimes you're noodling around with a sketch and something incongruous in the drawing calls forth the caption and other times you think of a line and just have to find a place for it. A cartoon with a caption like "I don't want to live forever, but I sure as hell don't want to be dead forever either" sprang into my head and I just had to find the right venue for it which was an old couple talking to each other.

All the information you need can be given in dialogue.

After all, most writing is done away from the typewriter, away from the desk. I'd say it occurs in the quiet, silent moments, while you're walking or shaving or playing a game, or whatever, or even talking to someone you're not vitally interested in.

I like talking to people.

New Yorkers seem to think the best thing two people can do is talk.

I just start writing, and in the process, one hopefully comes up with ideas and solutions and explores all the little nooks and crannies.

I'm usually up until around 1 A.M. or 2 A.M. I don't get much sleep - and I prefer it that way, writing notes and coming up with different ideas for two to three hours between 11 P.M. and 1 A.M. or 2 A.M.

I like talking.

Sometimes when you chat about something, a few ideas come up, you go this way or that way in training.

Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of a void, but out of chaos; the materials must in the first place be afforded; it can give form to dark, shapeless substances, but cannot bring into being the substance itself.

Novels begin, not on the page, but in meditation and day-dreaming - In thinking, not writing.

You really don't understand the first thing about writing...for one thing, early in the morning is the worst possible time. the brain is like a wet sponge at that hour. And for another, real writing is a question of staring into space and waiting for the right ideas.

Much of the activity we think of as writing is, actually, getting ready to write.

When I'm writing new material, I never have any trouble coming up with ideas.

When I think of talking, it is of course with a woman. For talking at its best being an inspiration, it wants a corresponding divine quality of receptiveness, and where will you find this but in a woman?

I do a lot of mental work before I ever start writing.

We spend our time sending messages to each other, talking and trying to listen at the same time, exchanging information. This seems to be our most urgent biological function; it is what we do with our lives.

Talk is free. You never know what's going to happen after you talk. There's always a perception about a guy until you actually sit down and talk with him.

What happens when two people talk? That is really the basic question here, because, that's the basic context in which all persuasion takes place.

Ideas are floating like fish. Desire for an idea is like a bait on a hook. If you desire an idea, it pulls and it makes a kind of a bait. Ideas will come swimming up. And you don't know them until they enter the conscious mind. And then bingo! There it is! You know it instantly. And then more come in. If you go fishing for ideas, a lot of ideas will just pop in. And one of them will make you fall in love.

Old Madame du Deffand and her friends talked for fifty years without stopping. And of it all, what remains? Perhaps three witty sayings. So that we are at liberty to suppose either that nothing was said, or that nothing witty was said, or that the fraction of three witty sayings lasted eighteen thousand two hundred and fifty nights, which does not leave a liberal allowance of wit for any one of them.

To talk, simply to talk! It sounds so little, and how much it is! When you have existed to the brink of middle age in bitter loneliness, among people to whom your true opinion on every subject on earth is blasphemy, the need to talk is the greatest of all needs.

Lester del Rey told me repeatedly that the first and most important part of writing fiction is just to think about the story. Don't write anything down. Don't try to pull anything together right away. Just dream for a while and see what happens. There isn't any timetable involved, no measuring stick for how long it ought to take. For each book, it is different. But that period of thinking, of reflection, is crucial to how successful your story will turn out to be.

Talking payes no toll.