A Quote by Jennifer Egan
I don't really know where my ideas come from. I start with a time and a place. That's what I need to get started, and an intellectual question.
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The creation of a film starts with an idea, a notion of a time period or characters, and you get really excited about the idea, and sell it to others if you need their support to write the script. You can't wait to get started, and then you try to start, and you struggle with the blank page, and you get some ideas, and they're bad ideas, and you write bad stuff. It's really bad.
If you have it you don't need it. If you need it, you don't have it. If you have it, you need more of it. If you have more of it, you don't need less of it. You need it to get it. And you certainly need it to get more of it. But if you don't already have any of it to begin with, you can't get any of it to get started, which means you really have no idea how to get it in the first place, do you? You can share it, sure. You can even stockpile it if you like. But you can't fake it. Wanting it. Needing it. Wishing for it. The point is if you've never had any of it ever people just seem to know.
An intellectual may be interested in ideas and policies for their own sake, but a politician's interest is exclusively in the question of whether an idea's time has come.
When you're a writer, the question people always ask you is, "Where do you get your ideas?" Writers hate this question. It's like asking Humphrey Bogart in The African Queen, "Where do you get your leeches?" You don't get ideas. Ideas get you.
The answer to the question "where do good ideas come from" is always the same, the come from bad ideas. If you come up with 20 bad ideas you get one good one.
It's so hard to get started creatively - it's really hard to get those first ideas out. You just have to do it over and over again, and hopefully better ones start to come. Also, anytime a good idea comes up, for a long time I think, "Oh, my God, that was so lucky that I thought of that idea, whew, I hope that happens again." The more you work at it, the more it happens, but it still feels lucky.
I guess I always need some kind of solitude to get to that place where I am open enough and have zero distractions to start on the initial ideas for songs.
Because I come from the place of interviewing, I know how to answer a question giving you what you need to hear and not a minute more.
I pretty much started out writing full time. I was an at-home mom and when my youngest entered kindergarten, I started writing. I was 35, and before that I really hadn't written at all. Which means, I guess, that a) it's never too late to start a writing career (or any career you really want) and b) it's OK to get to your mid-30s and still not know what you want to be when you grow up.
As an educator, I try to get people to be fundamentally curious and to question ideas that they might have or that are shared by others. In that state of mind, they have earned a kind of inoculation against the fuzzy thinking of these weird ideas floating around out there. So rather than correct the weird ideas, I would rather them to know how to think in the first place. Then they can correct the weird idea themselves.
I'm not saying abolish group work - I think there's a time and a place for people to come together and exchange ideas, but let's restore the respect we once had for solitude. And we need to be much more mindful of the way we come together.
Whereas you have someone like Houdini, who works really, really hard to get really, really famous, and then has actual intellectual ideas that he puts into the culture that stay there.
Senior men have no monopoly on great ideas. Nor do creative people. Some of the best ideas come from account executives, researchers and others. Encourage this, you need all the ideas you can get.
When we start to write for a new record, we never really know what we're doing. We don't come into the room with a set of ideas, but miraculously, a song comes out of it.
The world doesn’t need more people playing small. It’s time to stop hiding out and start stepping out. It’s time to stop needing and start leading. It’s time to start sharing your gifts instead of hoarding them or pretending they don’t exist. It’s time you started playing the game of life in a “big” way.
Digging down and finding out where your head is at when a fight is about to come, I used to get to a dark place and that's not really a place I want to go anymore. I got kids, I enjoy my life and I'm having a good time. I don't feel like I need to go there anymore.
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