J. R. R. Tolkien Quotes

Just as our eyes need light in order to see, our minds need ideas in order to conceive.

As a rule, with me an unfinished [idea] is a thing that might as well be rubbed out. It's better, if there's something good in it that I might make use of elsewhere, to leave it at the back of my mind than on paper in a drawer. If I leave it in a drawer it remains the same thing but if it's in the memory it becomes transformed into something else.

It's always a mystery to me, I have to confess. I've never been able to witness the birth of an idea. It seems as if one second, there's nothing particularly going on, and the next second, something is there.

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.

Let an idea swim to the surface like a fish in a pool...let the mind drift to the vision.

I think it's important to just be in your subconscious mind - at least when you're starting an idea.

You're bound to get idears if you go thinkin' about stuff

I don't know exactly where ideas come from, but when I'm working well ideas just appear. I've heard other people say similar things - so it's one of the ways I know there's help and guidance out there. It's just a matter of our figuring out how to receive the ideas or information that are waiting to be heard.

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

Imagination is the air of mind.

I have ideas whirring around my head all the time.

Just as our eyes need light in order to see, our minds need ideas in order to conceive.

I sometimes don't try to invent something. I wait for some kind of a direction - and it happens. I get an angle, for instance, and it just appears, and I say, 'Oh my God - that's it!'

What makes me different as a scientist is that I'm kind of imaginative. The ideas just happen.

The hardest thing is the idea. Ideas come from somewhere but as far as we know they come from nowhere.

Sporadic thoughts will pop into my head and I'll have to go write something down, and the next thing you know I've written a whole song in an hour.

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.

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.

I begin with an idea and then it becomes something else.

Imagination is the eye of the soul.

I would find myself laughing and wondering where these ideas came from. You can call it imagination, I suppose. But I was grateful for wherever they came from.

You never know when your ideas are going to come back to you.

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

Some of the best ideas I get seem to happen when I'm doing mindless manual labor or exercise. I'm not sure how that happens, but it leaves me free for remarkable ideas to occur.