A theory of creativity is actually just a metaphor. A pool of ideas, a well of memories, a voice.
Using supernatural beings to build the perfect weapon? Intriguing idea. " "Not really," I said. "They did it on Buffy the Vampire Slayer. A sub-par season. I slept through half the episodes.
The walls, the bars, the guns and the guards can never encircle or hold down the idea of the people.
The idea that you can get everything you want in one person is destructive, and maybe when you accept that the number is closer to 50 or 60 or 70 percent, that's when you can start to make some progress in choosing the right person.
Inquire, investigate, doubt yourself and others. To find truth, you must not cling to your convictions; if you are sure of the immediate, you will never reach the ultimate. Your idea that you were born and that you will die is absurd – both logic and experience contradict it.
I remember, when I was in university I studied history, and there was this one major historian of the Third Reich, Ian Kershaw. And his quote was, 'The path to Auschwitz was paved with indifference. ' I know it's not very funny being a comedian talking about the Holocaust, but I think it's an interesting idea that not everyone in Germany had to be a raving anti-Semite. They just had to be apathetic.
Only constant repetition will finally succeed in imprinting an idea on the memory of the crowd.
I gave up that idea of trying to make music that I thought other people would want. I just made music for myself and music for people that I knew.
I have no idea why I write. The old standards are: I like to express my feelings, stretch my imagination, earn money.
Introducing a technology is not a neutral act--it is profoundly revolutionary. If you present a new technology to the world you are effectively legislating a change in the way we all live. You are changing society, not some vague democratic process. The individuals who are driven to use that technology by the disparities of wealth and power it creates do not have a real choice in the matter. So the idea that we are giving people more freedom by developing technologies and then simply making them available is a dangerous illusion.
The idea of, 'The journey is the destination' is put into action by browsing in an indie record store. Besides, a human being is a much better guide than a 'More Like This' link on the internet.
Man's abiding happiness is not in getting anything but in giving himself up to what is greater than himself, to ideas which are larger than his individual life, the idea of his country, of humanity, of God.
If I get ideas independently of the act of writing, they never really fit. So for me, there's no hanging out, waiting for inspiration.
Socially, I like the idea of sitting in a theater with a bunch of people.
. . . And drinking neat liquor from the bottle, with all my long hair and my shirt undone and my beads, not so much the lizard king, more a gecko duchess, I fitted in nicely with their idea of what a creative person should be.
The War of the Roses in England and the Civil War in America were both intestinal conflicts arising out of similar ideas. In the first the clash was between feudalism and the new economic order; in the second, between an agricultural society and a new industrial one. Both led to similar ends; the first to the founding of the English nation, and the second to the founding of the American. Both were strangely interlinked; for it was men of the old military and not of the new economic mind--men, such as Sir Humphrey Gilbert and Sir Walter Raleigh--who founded the English colonies in America.
I'm not comfortable with words. I love images ,and I love sounds, and I love feelings. I like the idea of intuition. I think a lot of things in life are understood that way. But you internalize these things; they don't really pop out. Certain things are built inside - little areas of understanding. I feel that I live in darkness and confusion, and I'm trying, like we all are, to make some sort of sense of it.
The truth is sometimes a poor competitor in the market place of ideas – complicated, unsatisfying, full of dilemmas, always vulnerable to misinterpretation and abuse.
I was very prejudiced when I started arts school. I, like all of those kids, was like, "I don't like this modern stuff. " I came to arts school with a very stupid, conservative set of ideas about art.
You can call it wisdom, or sanity, or health, or enlightenment. I use the word God as a short-cut. I am comfortable with the word God because I don't have the foggiest idea of what it means.