“Working on a new idea is kind of like getting married. Then a new idea comes along and you think, 'Man, I'd really like to go out with her.' But you can't. At least not until the old idea is finished.”
Quote collection
Thinking Quotes — page 853 of 4756
“I think that's what people most always do with the stuff they can't make out - just forget it.”
“That's the day's business. Thinking. Thinking and isolation, because it doesn't matter if you pass the time of day with someone or not; in the end, you're alone. He seemed to have put in as many miles in his brain as he had with his feet. The thoughts kept coming and there was no way to deny them.”
“Things come in three major degrees in the human experience, I think. There's good, bad, and terrible. And as you go down into progressive darkness towards terrible, it gets harder and harder to make subdivisions.”
“He didn’t know if that was really true or not, but he discovered something which was tremendously liberating: he didn’t care. He was very tired of thinking and thinking and still not knowing. He was also tired of being frightened, like a man who has entered a cave on a lark and now begins to suspect he is lost. Stop thinking about it, then. That’s the solution.”
“My heart's with you, Bill, no matter how it turns out. My heart is with all of them, and I think that, even if we forget each other, we'll remember in our dreams.”
“Want a Coke?” Abra asked. “Sugar solves lots of problems, that’s what I think.”
“I think a lot of times dreams are nothing more than a kind of mental or spiritual flatulence. They're a way of relieving pressure.”
“The ghost story movie that scared me the most was The Changeling with George C. Scott. I think that's sometimes overlooked, but it's a wonderful piece of work.”
“He lay back, put his arm over his eyes, and tried to hold onto the anger, because the anger made him feel brave. A brave man could think. A coward couldn't.”
“I think of fear as a survival function, and in the stories that I write, the only thing that I've tried to do is provide people with nightmares which are really safe places to put those fears for a while because you can say afterwards that uh, that, that well it was all just make-believe anyway, so I just took my emotions for a walk.”
“I think what you do is, you keep your sensors open. And it's - the more that you do the job, the more you come to understand in a kind of intuitive way that you're always - you know, your radar is on. And the thing is going around and around and around. And it's not picking up any blips.”
“It hurts to imagine stuff. It can give you a headache. Probably doesn't hurt physically, but it hurts mentally. But the more that you can do it, the more you're able to get out of it. Everybody has that capacity, but I don't think everyone develops it.”
“I have an idea of how the book will finish up, but it very rarely finishes up the way that I think it's going to.”
“I want to write about spiders. To me, this is the one theme that cuts right across and scares just about everybody. Spiders, to me, are just about the most horrible, awful things that I can think about. I think everyone is afraid of spiders.”
“I and everyone else in this world live in what is probably the most difficult times that have ever been. We are facing total thermonuclear destruction; and, if you can make someone believe in a ghost or a demon or a vampire in the face of that, you are doing well. From my own personal point of view, I don't think just blood and guts is enough. At least, it isn't for me. Maybe it will turn someone's stomach; but, I'm not sure that is literature or even entertainment.”
“I simply think that there are things in this world that are relics. We have unsettling remnants of Atlantis. They have found things off Bermuda, great walls and things of that sort. This seems to indicate that there were races and cultures that went before us. And to me, that's an unsettling idea.”
“I still think that of all the people doing top fiction today, John D. MacDonald is the best.He was my model as a kid. If there are people out there that want to write, all you need to do is read 20 of his stories to get an idea what it takes to make a story kick over.”
“Somebody said the prospect of eminent death has a wonderful clarifying effect on the mind. And I don't know if that's true, but I do think it probably causes some changes, some evolution in the way a person works. But on a day-by-day basis, I just still enjoy doing what I'm doing.”
“As a kid, death seemed boring to me. As an adult, I think that it seems more like a waste of everything. Somebody once said every time a professor dies, a library burns.”