idea
The problem with hoarding [ideas] is you end up living off your reserves. Eventually you’ll become stale. If you give away everything you have, you are left with nothing. This forces you to look, to be aware, to replenish. Ideas are open knowledge. Don’t claim ownership. They’re not your ideas anyway, they’re someone else’s. They are out there floating by on the ether. You just have to put yourself in a frame of mind to pick them up.
It’s Not How Good You Are, It’s How Good You Want to Be (New York: Phaidon, 2003), 57.
His mind makes immense detours. Then he gets lost. And then I am able to bring him back, not because I know any more than he does, or because I am more whole, but because I have a sense of direction in the world of ideas.
The Diary of Anaïs Nin [Vol. 1 1931–1934] (New York: The Swallow Press, 1966), 158.
Catch things that have been falling for a thousand years.
Ideas, in a sense, are overrated. Of course, you need good ones, but at this point in our supersaturated culture, precious few are so novel that nobody else has ever thought of them before. It’s really about where you take the idea, and how committed you are to solving the endless problems that come up in the execution.
“Be Wrong as Fast as You Can,” New York Times Magazine, January 4, 2013.
I always think that everybody is getting their ideas in the shower and the people who are writing them down, keeping the soggy notes, are the writers.
“Scott Spencer,” interviewed by Lorrie Moore, BOMB magazine, Issue 67, Spring 1999.
Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen.
“Interview with a Best-Selling Author: John Steinbeck,” by Robert van Gelder in April 1947 issue of Cosmopolitan magazine, 18, 123–25.