Quotes About Ideas

I have some pretty forceful ideas about the world - obviously I do. But I suppose I can only really speak about them from within the protection of a literary form.

I'm not particularly interested in working with movie stars. It depends on where you come from, I suppose. Why are you making films? The reason I want make films is because they convey ideas. I think some directors make films because they want to hang out with movie stars and be part of Hollywood. They want to be a star themselves.

When it comes to orchestral music, whenever I see a concert with orchestra and strings, and I arrive and there are speakers up, my heart always sinks a little bit, and I think, 'It's going to be down to some sound guy's ideas.' Contact microphones on the violins. I'm a purist, I suppose.

You can be a sophisticated person and still have really old ideas about what love is supposed to look like.

You can't crush ideas by suppressing them. You can only crush them by ignoring them.

Liberals cannot win in the battle of ideas, so they resort to banning or suppressing ideas they don't like.

Invoking nature with its implied supremacy ignores that many cultures have fundamentally differing ideas of even what nature is, much less how it should work.

We have this idea that seriousness is of higher value. But surely there is more human pleasure and delight in time spent with humour than with pondering the great philosophical ideas.

I've found that many of the greatest ideas surface in bars because that's where many people cultivate inspiration.

Language is froth on the surface of thought.

I actually don't have a great surplus of ideas. Some evolve very slowly, over many years, but I sort of trust that all of the interesting ones will become something that I eventually end up doing.

No one works harder at inspiring athletes all over the world than our team at Nike. Creating those experiences requires an amazing amount of energy, a steady flow of big ideas to excite and surprise people, and a constant dialogue that connects us on a personal level.

We get excited by ideas, and we're more excited by being surprised by ideas than we are in dictating the course of events. We've found that leads to more interesting storytelling.

When ideas are confronted with reality, there will always be surprises.

I think on 'ER,' my other long-running show, I had some ideas about what's going on. 'Stargate Universe,' they were kind of secretive too a little bit about what they wanted to do, but I kind of liked working this way. I like the surprises, and I like knowing just enough to work on the character.

I kept a lot of my ideas to myself because I honestly thought no one cared. So it was surprising to find out that people did! Now I know that I can do anything, and I want other people to feel the same.

I just like magical, fantastical stuff. I don't really see it as surreal when I'm writing. It's just, I write, and then I have an idea, and usually, they're quite odd.

Most critical writing is drivel and half of it is dishonest. It is a short cut to oblivion, anyway. Thinking in terms of ideas destroys the power to think in terms of emotions and sensations.

Thinking in terms of ideas destroys the power to think in terms of emotions and sensations.

Jewish Warsaw, which was roughly a third of Warsaw proper, was a city of rabbis and swindlers, capitalists and poets; but, most of all, it was a city of talkers. There were so many ideas in the air you could get an education simply by breathing deeply. (p. 206)

Ideas at first considered outrageous or ridiculous or extreme gradually become what people think they've always believed. How the transformation happened is rarely remembered, in part because it's compromising: it recalls the mainstream when the mainstream was, say, rabidly homophobic or racist in a way it no longer is; and it recalls that power comes from the shadows and the margins, that our hope is in the dark around the edges, not the limelight of center stage. Our hope and often our power.

Changes in ideas and values also result from work done by writers, scholars, public intellectuals, social activists, and participants in social media.

Reading is also traveling, with the eyes along the length of an idea, which can be folded up into the compressed space of a book and unfolded within your imagination and your understanding.

To walk the same route again can mean to think the same thoughts again, as though thoughts and ideas were indeed fixed objects in a landscape one need only know how to travel through. In this way, walking is reading, even when both the walking and reading are imaginary, and the landscape of the memory becomes a text as stable as that to be found in the garden, the labyrinth, or the stations.