“Anyone with a great product to sell should never criticize competing products. Your product should sell on its own merit. Consumers want the best of the best, not the best of a bad situation.”
“Large-scale change is grounded in small steps toward a big idea”
“It is commonly said to my little friend Legion: Read the great writers for style. But I say to him: Read the great dead masters for ideas. Devour them, Fletcherize them, digest, assimilate, make them part of your blood; let the enriched blood visit your brain. The resultant activities will be fairly your own, and the little kinks and convolutions of your brain, which are entirely different from the kinks of any other brain, will furnish you all the style you will ever get. There are no really fresh ideas; just as there is not any fresh air. Air and ideas are refreshed and refreshing, vitalized and vitalizing; but the thoughts have been thought before and the air has been breathed before.”
“True, the initial ideas are in general those of an individual, but the establishment of the reality and truth is in general the work of more than one person.”
“To get fruits from the tree branches, shake them with hands; to get fruits from men, shake them with clever ideas!”
“Create a good idea and leave it in the darkness; you will then see that people will come with the candles in their hands to find it, because just like the bad, the good has also a special scent!”
“By perceiving the end of those illusive ideas and statuses as real, see yourself as though you have already accomplished what you have had a revelation to do. Then go, make it happen.”
“Listen, the next revolution is gonna be a revolution of ideas.”
“I ve just had a really evil idea. My favourite kind”
“A person who does not read cannot think. He may have good mental processes, but he has nothing to think about. You can feel for people or natural phenomena and react to them, but they are not ideas. You cannot think about them. [Life magazine, December 10, 1965]”
“It was understood that they shared the same thresholds--the same inexhaustible appetite for wasting time, for discussing lofty ideas, for dissecting trivial things, for driving to nowhere in particular, for listening to music, for talking about books, for obsessing over pop culture, but mostly for laughing, talking, and simply being together. There was nothing one could say that the other would find too cruel or too kind. And on those rare occasions when they did tire of each other, they needed only go a day without talking before they yearned to reconnect.”
“The best way to get a good idea is to have a lot of ideas.”
“...at the end of the day there was nothing to be gained by reminding people that everything that had ever been written, even the greatest and most authoritative texts in the world, were about dreams, not real life, dreams conjured up by words.”
“And you realize that there’s no such thing as an individual, we’re just all a collection of each other’s influence on each other. Everyone says things to each other, the television, your parents, your friends, that’s all we are, is a collection of intermingling ideas as a collective.”
“So it turns out that late-night flashes of brilliance often look a little less brilliant in the bright light of morning.”
“After passionately nursing this idea for about an hour, I suddenly had another idea: no I wouldn t. Of course I wouldn t make an entire city out of cereal boxes in the basement. The moment I had this second thought, I knew this was the real one.”
“Every writer or wanna-be writer has ideas for books. The problem isn t finding an idea, it s choosing one”