Clear and precise ideas are the most dangerous, for one does not dare to change them.
If you are possessed by an idea, you find it expressed everywhere, you even smell it.
Most critical writing is drivel and half of it is dishonest. It is a short cut to oblivion, anyway. Thinking in terms of ideas destroys the power to think in terms of emotions and sensations.
Few things are as immutable as the addiction of political groups to the ideas by which they have once won office.
When you get an idea into your head you find it in everything.
I think people get fixated on the example of an idea.
Men can intoxicate themselves with ideas as effectually as with alcohol or with bang and produce, be dint of serious thinking, mental conditions hardly distinguishable from monomania.
A writer falls in love with an idea and gets carried away.
When I was younger, I could get that white-knuckle grip of holding on to an idea and not wanting to let it go.
Furthermore, even if ideas were gettable - say, stacked in a secluded cave like the Dead Sea scrolls - I wouldn't go there. An 'idea,' especially one adhered to from start to finish, can be disastrous for a compelling piece of fiction.
A person may dwell so long upon a thought that it may take him a prisoner.
If you have one strong idea, you can't help repeating it and embroidering it. Sometimes I think that authors should write one novel and then be put in a gas chamber.
Hardly any original thoughts on mental or social subjects ever make their way among mankind or assume their proper importance in the minds even of their inventors, until aptly selected words or phrases have as it were nailed them down and held them fast.
