When I wrote Rick, I had the idea that I would take the plot of nearly every opera and turn it into a dark film, which is something I still may do.
It turns out she is Canadian, my editor, and so she drinks like a fish. So she wasn't a lightweight at all. And in the morning, she said that the idea still seemed like a good one, and here we are.
I had this idea about terrible things happening to orphans, and I knew it was such a horrible idea that the idea of writing it down and then submitting it professionally was obviously absurd.
The file clanked against me, my stupid idea nobody would have gotten had I ever done it. You even wouldn't have gotten it, Ed, I thought, watching her go. It's why we broke up, so here it is. Ed, how could you?
There's an idea out there that salespeople have actually been obliterated by the Internet, which is just not supported by the facts.
I have no idea how to start doing something that doesn't connect with me or my soul, somehow.
If I were to give a prize for the single best idea anybody ever had, I'd give it to Darwin for the idea of natural selection - ahead of Newton, ahead of Einstein - because his idea unites the two most disparate features of our universe: the world of purposeless, meaningless matter and motion, particles jostling on the one side, and the world of meaning and purpose, design on the other.
The WTO has outlived its usefulness as a setting for trade negotiations. It can still be a good place to resolve disputes (though this can take years) and share ideas, but most countries would be better off choosing their own trading partners and lowering trade barriers at their own pace.
It's true that there are people who live the idea of being an artist, as opposed to the idea of making art.
I have ideas all of the time from the beginning, but they never really wind up turning out like I thought they would.
I have new ideas every day, and I always want to take on new challenges.
I like to mix the real and the imaginary. Sometimes it is characters inspired by real people I know or know of. Sometimes it is a named person from the common cultural dreamscape. And it is tricky, because they have a lot of associated ideas that come with them, and a lot of actual facts.
There are lots of authentic, moving characters in so-called systems novels, just as there are certainly deep structural ideas in some character-driven novels.
The idea that you can live off the grid and just do your own thing is a very American idea - that you should be able to do your own thing, if you want to, if you're willing to pay the price for it. I think the price has gotten higher and higher.
If you look at the early nineteenth century you see the idea that we educate children to be voters and to be participants in our popular democracy. And then at the turn of the century when more and more immigrants are coming into the schools, Americanization becomes a more explicit part of the agenda.
I was very excited to hone in on John Goodman. Casting John first really set the tone. He's very good at being terrifying and being hilarious, and I loved the idea of that character not being merely 'moustache-twirly'. I enjoyed being scared by him.
Travel is the discovery of truth; an affirmation of the promise that human kind is far more beautiful than it is flawed. With each trip comes a new optimism that where there is despair and hardship, there are ideas and people just waiting to be energized, to be empowered, to make a difference for good.
Words were like objects, making the idea more solid -- less a poisonous gas and more a ... cube of crystallized thought.
Books ... were merely nodes in a near-infinite matrix of information that exists in four dimensions, evolving toward the idea of the concept of the approximation of the shadow of Truth vertically through time as well as longitudinally through knowledge.
Gass once wrote: "Language serves not only to express thought but to make possible thoughts which could not exist without it." Here is the essence of mankind's creative genius: not the edifices of civilization nor the bang-flash weapons which can end it, but the words which fertilize new concepts like spermatozoa attacking an ovum. It might be argued that the Siamese twin infants of word/idea are the only contribution the human species can, will, or should make to the raveling cosmos.
Copyright? Copy RIGHT: Steal ideas, steal facts but do not steal words.
To me, there was an interesting movie to be made about two people who had been on that whirlwind romance and what happens after the fairy tale wedding. And this thought coincided or coalesced when I was at a wedding of a friend who got married to somebody that literally everybody in the congregation thought that you definitely should not get married to. This was the worst idea either of you have ever had.
The idea that things used to be better is fantasy. It's putting a halo on something that no one can disprove.
The idea that things intrinsically were just better is so stupid to me because they never were. It's all relative.
There's when a phrase circles in my head in a number of ways for any number of days, weeks, or months, and then that eventually becomes a song. There's a slow permeation of the idea and then that leads into a bunch of themes and becomes a bunch of lines.
