“A man may die, nations may rise and fall, but an idea lives on. Ideas have endurance without death.”
“You grow ravenous. You run fevers. You know exhilarations. You can t sleep at night, because your beast-creature ideas want out and turn you in your bed. It is a grand way to live.”
“Censorship is the child of fear and the father of ignorance.”
“I think of myself as a bad writer with big ideas, but I d rather be that than a big writer with bad ideas.”
“That s the great secret of creativity. You treat ideas like cats: you make them follow you.”
“There s no flesh or blood within this cloak to kill. There s only an idea. Ideas are bulletproof.”
“The book is a film that takes place in the mind of the reader. That s why we go to movies and say, Oh, the book is better.”
“A word to the unwise. Torch every book. Char every page. Burn every word to ash. Ideas are incombustible. And therein lies your real fear.”
“The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed, the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually slaves of some defunct economist.”
“I can t understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I m frightened of the old ones.”
“I have tried to be a man of letters in love with ideas in order to be a wiser and more loving person, hoping to leave the world just a little better than I found it.”
“Always carry a notebook. And I mean always. The short-term memory only retains information for three minutes; unless it is committed to paper you can lose an idea for ever.”
“Chance favors the connected mind.”
“The only people who can ever put ideas into context are people who don t care; the unbiased and apathetic are usually the wisest dudes in the room. If you want to totally misunderstand why something is supposedly important, find the biggest fan of that particular thing and ask him for an explanation. He will tell you everything that doesn t matter to anyone who isn t him. He will describe paradoxical details and share deeply personal anecdotes, and it will all be autobiography; he will simply be explaining who he is by discussing something completely unrelated to his life.”
“To compel a man to furnish funds for the propagation of ideas he disbelieves and abhors is sinful and tyrannical.”
“People wonder why so many writers come to live in Paris. I’ve been living ten years in Paris and the answer seems simple to me: because it’s the best place to pick ideas. Just like Italy, Spain.. or Iran are the best places to pick saffron. If you want to pick opium poppies you go to Burma or South-East Asia. And if you want to pick novel ideas, you go to Paris.”
“No matter what anybody tells you, words and ideas can change the world”