"I always say it's like fishing. You sit quietly and not much is happening for maybe a long time. And then suddenly you get a bite and there's an idea. And the deeper the line goes and the better the bait the bigger the fish you're going to get. And you have to be not necessarily quiet but you have to be open for these things to happen you have to be paying attention."

"I strictly go by ideas that come to me. And, I really feel that ideas when you catch them has a tremendous amount of power. Maybe it's a fuzzy sort of glimpse of it, but if you start writing you realize that you actually saw a lot more at first than you thought you did and these things start unfolding. And then, the trick is to translate them as true as possible to the original thing and they, I think, maintain a power if you do that."

"It's a strange thing, ideas. They're not there, and then they're not there again, and then suddenly they're there. And it's a magical and beautiful thing when they do come. And then the next thing you know, there are some ideas you don't like. So those are discarded or saved until they find their place. When you fall in love with ideas, that's pretty close to euphoria."

"Oh, it's a tricky thing. If ideas come from outside you, how can you say they're yours? They're more like little gifts or something. Sometimes strange, twisted little gifts!"

"Once an idea comes it comes with all this power, like a gigantic spark. And everything is contained in it, and it thrills your soul. You know just what to do from then on. It's complete."

"I think that ideas exist outside of ourselves. I think somewhere, we're all connected off in some very abstract land. But somewhere between there and here ideas exist. And I think the mind isn't conscious enough to go all the way to where we're connected, but it's conscious of a certain amount of that territory. And when these ideas fly into the conscious part, then you can capture them. But if they're outside of the conscious part, you don't even know about them. So you just hope that you can make the conscious part of your mind bigger or that these ideas will fly into your airspace, so you can shoot them down and grab them and take them home. So that's all you try to do. Sometimes an idea will strike you when you're sitting in a quiet chair. But sometimes an idea will strike you when you're standing. Sometimes music will also help you. If I thought I could just sit still in a quiet place and get ideas, I would do that all the time, but sometimes nothing happens. There's no rhyme or reason to it. But you've got to write them down right away. I forget so many things. Then if I forget it and try to remember it, my whole day is ruined because I can't remember and I feel horrible. And I imagine that it was one of the all time great ideas. And it probably isn't."

"There's an original idea somewhere that's sort of a magnet, and it attracts ideas that will join up with it - sort of like a little solar system. They all swim about around this sun, which is the original idea, and pretty soon you've got a system going. And maybe something will swim through, but it won't really be part of it, so it'll keep on going and go away, because it didn't fit... This takes a lot of concentration - you have to spend lots of time thinking about these ideas, capturing them, because they'll swim so deep you won't see them. They'll go away - you've got to dive down there and catch them, and once you catch them, you've got to look at them very carefully, because the way you see them the first time you'll forget about later on. You've got to make sure that you preserve the way you originally saw them - that's where the power of the idea is. Now I know that it's good to have rules of thought, but I don't think it's too good to analyze too much while you're flowing, because sometimes you can think too much. Later on when you look back at what you've done, it seems almost magical - there's so much power there and so many things that were right on, but there was no thinking"

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