Quotes about Ideas

ABOUT IDEAS

Don't worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you'll have to ram them down people's throats.
Howard Aiken

Fitzgerald never got rid of anything; the ghosts of his adolescence, the failures of his youth, the doubts of his maturity plagued him to the end. He was supremely a part of the world he described, so much a part that he made himself its king and then, when he saw it begin to crumble, he crumbled with it and led it to death.
John Aldridge

Invent your own mythology or be slave to another man's.
William Blake

Everything that doesn't kill you, makes you stronger. And later on you can use it in some story.
Tapani Bagge

Everybody walks past a thousand story ideas every day. The good writers are the ones who see five or six of them. Most people don't see any.
Orson Scott Card

Most of the basic material a writer works with is acquired before the age of fifteen.
Willa Cather

If you haven't got an idea, start a story anyway. You can always throw it away, and maybe by the time you get to the fourth page you will have an idea, and you'll only have to throw away the first three pages.
William Campbell Gault

When I examine myself and my methods of thought I come to the conclusion that the gift of fantasy has meant more to me than my talent for absorbing knowledge.
Albert Einstein

The mind can proceed only so far upon what it knows and can prove. There comes a point where the mind takes a higher plane of knowledge, but can never prove how it got there. All great discoveries have involved such a leap.
Albert Einstein

Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.
Albert Einstein

Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.
T. S. Eliot

All good ideas arrive by chance.
Max Ernst

The writer's only responsibility is to his art. He will be completely ruthless if he is a good one... If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate; the Ode on a Grecian Urn is worth any number of old ladies.
William Faulkner

There is no idea so brilliant or original that a sufficiently-untalented writer can't screw it up.
Raymond Feist

Observe, don't imitate.
John M. Ford

The ideas aren't that important. Really they aren't. Everyone's got an idea for a book, a movie, a story, a TV series.
Neil Gaiman

You need more than a beginning if you're going to start a book. If all you have is a beginning, then once you've written that beginning, you have nowhere to go.
Neil Gaiman

The writer's genetic inheritance and her or his experiences shape the writer into a unique individual, and it is this uniqueness that is the writer's only stuff for sale.
James Gunn

Nighttime is really the best time to work. All the ideas are there to be yours because everyone else is asleep.
Catherine O'Hara

To write fiction, one needs a whole series of inspirations about people in an actual environment, and then a whole lot of work on the basis of those inspirations.
Aldous Huxley

I'm not sure I would have ever started to draw, let alone write, if my childhood hadn't been so happy. It was a mixture of comfort and adventure. An excellent mixture!
Tove Jansson

Every bush can burn if you fire it with your imagination.
Stanislaw Jerzy Lec

And if I have to be a thieving, immoral crow in order to write a book, then by God, I'll grow black feathers on my fanny and croak as loud as I can.
Pasi Jääskeläinen

I hated school. I don't trust anybody who looks back on the years from 14 to 18 with any enjoyment. If you liked being a teenager, there's something really wrong with you.
Stephen King

I have the heart of a small boy. It is in a glass jar on my desk
Stephen King

It is crazy even to ask what creativity is. It would be just as useful to interview a caraway plant in your garden and ask: "How did you decided to be a spice?"
Eeva Kilpi

If you're going to be a writer, the first essential is just to write. Do not wait for an idea. Start writing something and the ideas will come. You have to turn the faucet .. the water starts to flow.
Louis L'Amour

You can't wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.
Jack London

The task of a writer consists in being able to make something out of an idea.
Thomas Mann

The first step to becoming a better writer is believing your own experience is worth writing about.
Peter Marmorek

There are no dull subjects. There are only dull writers.
H.L. Mencken

When you take stuff from one writer, it's plagiarism. But when you take it from many writers, it's research.
William Mizner

The value of life lies not in the length of days, but in the use we make of them; a man may live long yet live very little.
Michel de Montaigne

The best way to have a good idea is to have lots of ideas.
Linus Pauling

Some men see things as they are and ask why. Others dream things that never were and ask why not.
George Bernard Shaw

What's hard, in hacking as in fiction, is not writing, it's deciding what to write.
Neal Stephenson

Whatever inspiration is, it's born from a continuous "I don't know."
Wislawa Szymborska

No tale is so good... but can be spoilt in the telling.
Terence, 160 BC

How vain it is to sit down to write if you have not stood up to live.
Henry David Thoreau

Who is more to be pitied, a writer bound and gagged by policemen or one living in perfect freedom who has nothing more to say?
Kurt Vonnegut

There is no idea so stupid or hackneyed that a sufficiently-talented writer can't get a good story out of it.
Lawrence Watt-Evans

An idea that is not dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at all.
Oscar Wilde

We grow great by dreams. All big men are dreamers. They see things in the soft haze of a spring day or in the red fire of a long winter's evening. Some of us let these great dreams die, but others nourish and protect them; nurse them through bad days till they bring them to the sunshine and light which comes always to those who sincerely hope that their dreams will come true.
Woodrow Wilson