Quotes about ideas

Let's get one thing clear right now, shall we? There is no Idea Dump, no Story Central, no Island of the Buried Bestsellers; good story ideas seem to come quite literally from nowhere, sailing at you right out of the empty sky: two previously unrelated ideas come together and make something new under the sun. Your job isn't to find these ideas but to recognize them when they show up.

Always in life an idea starts small, it is only a sapling idea, but the vines will come and they will try to choke your idea so it cannot grow, and it will die and you will never know you had a big idea, an idea so big it could have grown thirty meters through the dark canopy of leaves and touched the face of the sky. The vines are people who are afraid of originality, of new thinking. Most people you encounter will be vines; when you are a young plant they are very dangerous. Always listen to yourself, Peekay. It is better to be wrong than simply to follow convention. If you are wrong, no matter, you have learned something and you grow stronger. If you are right, you have taken another step toward a fulfilling life.

When all the good ideas have been expended, I quoted to myself, one might as well try a bad one.

“From within such a calcified culture, no change can be generated; the impetus for reform must arise from without. Hence, the external threat posed by Hunan Diath.”

“Who does not exist,” said Filidor.

“Who need not exist,” said Gaskarth, “so long as the idea can do its work.”

I asked, “Is it so easy to change a cultural vision.”

“The relevant measures are not ease and difficulty. The relevant measures are readiness and unreadiness. If the time isn’t right for a new idea, no power on earth can make it catch on, but if the time is right, it will sweep the world like wildfire.

I’ve seen this all before, Althalus ... many, many times. An idea that’s born in glory starts to tarnish almost immediately.

I was left with a great idea gutted by critical examination. But that's good. That's how we make ideas better—by trying to poke holes in them and then finding ways to fix the holes.

That’s how ideas are generated. Unusual combinations, mixing old and new, stimulate original ideas, that is, ideas with origins.

Theories were a dime a dozen. The partition that separated science and wishful thinking was evidence: observations and firm facts.

Recall the model of the paradigm shift introduced by Thomas Kuhn: Every important new idea in science sounds strange at first. As the physicist Niels Bohr put it, great innovations inevitably appear muddled, confusing, and incomplete, only half-understood even by their discoverers, and a mystery to everyone else. There is no hope, Bohr said, for any speculation that does not look absurd at first glance.

Sure—that’s the concept. It wouldn’t be the first concept that had to be modified in the face of experience.

Foster shook his head. “The inherent inertia of the human mind,” he said. “How it fights to resist new ideas.”