"America has to be not just an idea but a living, breathing thing."
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Ideas quotes
Ideas
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Ideas quotes (page 160 of 821)
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"I was in the projects dreaming about doing music and now I've done music. When I had nothing to when I had something I still have this driving force that's fueling me every day and that's making ideas reality."
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"You don't have to stay in your lane when it comes to friendship or ideas."
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"People don't really know themselves until they're 30. Like most people nowadays, I went to university, got a degree and wandered for a bit. I trained to be a chartered accountant, which I didn't much enjoy, and it was only slowly that the idea of becoming a creative writer gelled."
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"I have never had too much trouble for creative ideas to spring up in my mind."
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"You know that feeling when you finish a final exam and you think, 'I never want to do that again'? Well I have the same feeling when I finish a novel. Each time I say, 'I think I may retire now' and then after six months the ideas start to churn again. I could never stop."
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"Our country, if that is what we want, can now permanently radiate love, understanding, the power of the spirit and of ideas. It is precisely this glow that we can offer as our specific contribution to international politics."
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"To serve grand ideas with a major work is not bad, nor is it all there's to art."
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"Sometimes you do know where the ideas are coming from and sometimes you don't. You might get a song coming through that you just don't know about."
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"The idea [of A Period of Transition album] was to get a break from everything for a while because I've been doing it for so long. I started doing it when I was 12."
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"Only an unhinged movie survives as a disconnected series of images, of peaks, of visual icebergs. It should display not one central idea but many. It should not reveal a coherent philosophy of composition. It must live on, and because of, its glorious ricketiness."
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"The print does not always have the same shape as the body that impressed it, and it doesn't always derive from the pressure of a body. At times it reproduces the impression a body has left in our mind: it is the print of an idea."
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"This, in fact, is the power of the imagination, which, combining the memory of gold with that of the mountain, can compose the idea of a golden mountain."
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"I started to write [The Name of the Rose] in March of 1978, moved by a seminal idea. I wanted to poison a monk."
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"I don't believe that a writer 'gets' (takes into the head) an 'idea' (some sort of mental object) 'from' somewhere, and then turns it into words, and writes them on paper. At least in my experience, it doesn't work that way. The stuff has to be transformed into oneself, it has to be composted, before it can grow into a story."
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"Science fiction - and the correct shortcut is 'sf' - uses actual scientific facts or theories for the source ideas or framework of the story. It has some scientific content, however speculative. If it breaks a law of physics, it knows it's doing so and follows up the consequences. If it invents a society of aliens, it does so with some respect for and knowledge of the social sciences and what you might call social probabilities. And some of it is literarily self-aware enough to treat its metaphors as metaphors."
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"Suppose we were (as we might be) an influence, an idea, a thing intangible, invulnerable, without front or back, drifting about like a gas? Armies were like plants, immobile, firm-rooted, nourished through long stems to the head. We might be a vapour, blowing where we listed Ours should be a war of detachment. We were to contain the enemy by the silent threat of a vast, unknown desert"
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"I am glad you have a Cat, but I do not believe it is So remarkable a cat as My Cat. My Cat is a Lilliecat Hubvously. What a lilliecat it is. There never was such a Lilliecat. Its Name is JELLYORUM and its one Idea is to be Usefull!!"
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"I don't work with an outline, except a vague one in my head, a general idea of character, place, arc... I'm like a composer with a symphony in their head: I can hear the music, I just have to figure out how to put it down on paper. But I don't always know where my stories are going when I begin."
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"I never went to art school and I never thought of going to an art school. It was just a way of manifesting these ideas I had. Ideas came to me that I needed to express."
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