Idea Cultivation Quotes

In the managerial organization, the top people sit in judgment; in the innovative organization it is their job to encourage ideas, no matter how unripe or crude.

When we have a brilliant idea, instead of making others think it is ours, why not let them cook and stir the idea themselves.

Don't stop. Narrow your focus to one idea, and make it work. That will give birth to all of the others. All you can do is plant the seed and water it.

Sometimes I'll hear a phrase or a word and write it down in my little black notebook (a writer's best mate), then come back to it and work a plot around it.

Ideas in secret die. They need light and air or they starve to death.

The host of men who stand between a great thinker and the average man are not automatic transmitters. They work on the ideas; perhaps that is why a genius usually hates his disciples.

Socrates called himself a midwife of ideas. A great book is often such a midwife, delivering to full existence what has been coiled like an embryo in the dark, silent depths of the brain.

The reason I collect good ideas is because plots themselves are very difficult indeed to come by.

And I liked that whole idea that energy comes from not disseminating your ideas and talking about them.

There's a great temptation to throw things in, as you put it, that you think are neat, or that you have a very clear, specific memory of and think you could do a good job writing about. What I find is that it's like a seed you plant. You can try it, and if it will grow and connect with other ideas in the book, and you can see connections that you can actually realize on the page, then you're allowed to leave it in. But if it just kind of lies there and doesn't really add up to anything or there's no chemistry with everything else going on in the book, then you have to take it out.