People always think that history proceeds in a straight line. It doesn't. Social attitudes don't change in a straight line. There's always a backlash against progressive ideas.
I have a tendency to feel a bit embarrassed when approached, but it's such a thrill to know that you did something that people enjoyed so much. It's an even bigger thrill when they talk to you about ideas that you worked so hard to get in there, and they single them out as reasons they enjoyed it so much.
I have a slightly contrarian streak as a writer, and one of the things I was interested in was how distilled could I make a life, and how I could cross what is kind of trivialized as a domestic novel with a novel of ideas, a philosophical novel.
I've always had ideas for more books than I can write.
What happens with a lot of leaders is that their leadership style is like ADD; they are all over the place with different ideas. They could be driving one idea forward but then move on to something else too soon.
My ideas come when I least expect it, so I've always got to have a studio nearby or close by somewhere.
The writer, the poet, the novelist, are all creators. This does not mean that they invent language; it means that they use language to create beauty, ideas, images. This is why we cannot do without them.
Between my hatred of mall shopping and my mother's firm ideas about how a girl should dress, my style choices were pretty unenthusiastic: plaid skirts or whatever empire-waisted thingamabob was on sale at Sears.
A guitar for me is pretty much strictly in the context of writing songs for my band, coming up with ideas with my band, and then being able to perform those songs as best as I can on stage - that's what the guitar for me has always been.
You have to look to the future with optimism instead of negative ideas. Take the good and the bad and face it head on.
I realized I liked being in the studio and working on translating the ideas into recordings.
Creativity and insight almost always involve an experience of acute pattern recognition: the eureka moment in which we perceive the interconnection between disparate concepts or ideas to reveal something new.
Certainly, Occupy Wall Street protesters have different ideas about the movement's mission. Many of the marchers I met even disagreed on the purpose of their trek - some thought it was about getting to Washington to protest the 'supercommittee'; others thought it was about visiting other Occupations.
You don't accomplish a lot by changing people's opinions by shoving facts down their throat. I think you change people's opinions by opening your heart up and showing the parallels between you and another person. That's how people's ideas shift.
A graphic designer, you know, who understands ideas and understands that ideas are what makes the world go round, could change the world with a magazine. If one talent could do it right now, and everybody would stop saying it's the death of magazines.
Kanye is the leading eagle: he's like the president who stands up for kids like us who have ideas.
Writers can express ideas and emotions that are important to them but have no other means of expression. Some of these ideas may be fantastic, and some of the emotions may be given clearer voice in fantastic fiction.
You can say that I endorse Mitt Romney, but that's not just because I'm a white man. We all have things which we're for and ideas which we support.
I'm not interested in gothic storytelling or the horrific for its own sake. I'm always interested in it as a way of getting at larger ideas or important meaning. And you don't see that as much as you'd think in the history of horror cinema. A lot of times, it's scariness for scariness' own sake.
I try to write about internal experience versus the external self. I like to present ideas, but not package them neatly.
I like being in charge. I like being able to control my own destiny and ideas.
A moral monopoly is the antithesis of a marketplace of ideas.
I tend to write longer narrative pieces after I've finished writing a novel - when the fiction's finished and put away, and I have a chance to take all the ideas that are buried inside of my novels and work with them directly.
I guess that's just the life of an inventor: what people do with your ideas takes you totally by surprise.
I've studied documentarians extensively to come up with my own in-house style. I'm a student of Michael Moore's films, of Eisenstein, Riefenstahl. Leave the politics aside, you have to learn from those past masters on how they were trying to communicate their ideas.
Beyond racing, I just love the art form of running, of conceiving new ideas like the 50 Marathons in 50 States in 50 Days. It's the ultimate expression of what I love to do, which is run, and travel, and see this great country.
Lots of people dream big and talk about big bold ideas but never do anything. I judge people by what they've done. The ratio of something to nothing is infinite. So just do something.
When it's a sharing and improvisational meeting, where you're riffing off other people's ideas, that actually can be productive.
I don't do much more than organise other people's ideas and insights and thoughts, and sort of harvest them, and inventory them and present them.
A debate has one purpose, one purpose only, and that is to facilitate the exchange of ideas directly between two candidates, and that's it.
Enough to using Texas as a political laboratory for testing far-right ideas. Enough to using Texas as a workshop for fattening the wallets of their special interest friends and supporters. And enough of politicians listening only to each other, rather than real Texans.
I gleaned different style ideas over the years. In Southern California, there is a big rockabilly sub-culture. So when I would go to car shows, I would see women dressed like this. I had a teacher in high school that always had her Bette Paige bangs.
Reality is very, very contradictory, and so I try to write just perfecting what I see, what I read, what I feel, in a feel-thinking way. Not only giving ideas, or receiving ideas, or trying to explain something, but mainly feel-thinking, a feel-thinking language able to tie the heart and the mind, which have been divorced.
I've just written a very gritty, non-magical take on the King Arthur legend, 'Here Lies Arthur,' and I'm currently toying with some other historical ideas, as well as working with the illustrator David Wyatt on some sequels to my Victorian space opera 'Larklight.'
When men do not have healthy notions of the Divinity, false ideas supplant them, just as in bad times one uses counterfeit money when there is no good money.
You have to test your ideas in a public forum.
