Grace Lee Boggs Quotes

You need to understand how human beings bring together their brains and enable their ideas to combine and recombine, to meet and, indeed, to mate. In other words, you need to understand how ideas have sex.

Brown’s core value of promoting the free and open exchange of ideas is bedrock to our capacity to fulfill our mission as a university. This value applies not only when ideas are agreeable and aligned with our own. Protecting the right to free expression and promoting open discourse is even more essential when ideas are divergent, abhorrent or even hurtful.

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 have not come up with anything original. It needs a better brain than mine! I have done what I can do in taking Dawkins' idea and extending it.

I have a creative mind, so if I listen to the song, I have an idea, I thought of five or six months ago, I'll bring it back into the playing field. I can tweak ideas or make them better. Just come up with something and then we go from there.

No one can have an idea once he starts really listening.

All there is to writing is having ideas. To learn to write is to learn to have ideas.

Good ideas stay with you until you eventually write the story.

The idea for any cartoon (my experience, anyway) is rarely spontaneous. Good ideas usually evolve out of pretty lame ones, and vice versa.

A man who listens because he has nothing to say can hardly be a source of inspiration. The only listening that counts is that of the talker who alternately absorbs and expresses ideas.

Progress is often just a good idea away.

Once you find the right idea, then go ahead and embellish it.

Stand-up isn't something I just sit down and start writing - it's ideas you come up with in the shower, while you're driving, waiting in line.

If I get ideas independently of the act of writing, they never really fit. So for me, there's no hanging out, waiting for inspiration.

To develop the creative attitude, analyze and focus on the wanted SOLUTION; seek out and fill your mind with the FACTS; write down ideas, both sensible and seemingly wild; let the facts and ideas simmer in your mind; evaluate, recheck, settle on the creative ideas.

The productiveness of any meeting depends on the level of thought given to the agenda in advance, and you should never leave a meeting without writing a follow-up list with each item assigned to one person. And go outside. All the big ideas are on the outside. You'll never have a creative idea at your desk.

Be alone, that is the secret of invention; be alone, that is when ideas are born.

Ideas are of themselves extraordinarily valuable, but an idea is just an idea. Almost anyone can think up an idea. The thing that counts is developing it into a practical product.

The point of a notebook is to jumpstart the mind.

Ideas exist in the marketplace; they are thrown out for everyone to use.

There was no single moment when I thought, Aha! What a great idea! Rather there was a slow and gradual accumulation of numerous small ideas.

Knowledge is the stuff from which new ideas are made. Thus, the real key to being creative lies in what you do with your knowledge.

You see, writing down your meanderings gets something started deep in the recesses of your brain. That distant part of your mind knows that you want to write stories or poems or plays and not endless jabber, and it will get to work. It may take a while. You may have to write this stuff for hours or days or weeks, but eventually that subterranean part of your brain will come through and begin to send you ideas.

The brain is a commodity used to fertilize ideas.