"All morning I struggled with the sensation of stray wisps of one world seeping through the cracks of another. Do you know the feeling when you start reading a new book before the membrane of the last one has had time to close behind you? You leave the previous book with ideas and themes -- characters even -- caught in the fibers of your clothes, and when you open the new book, they are still with you.
-- Margaret Lea"
— Diane Setterfield (The Thirteenth Tale)

"Ideas come from everything"
— Alfred Hitchcock

"Ideas are bulletproof."
— Alan Moore (V for Vendetta)

"The ideas that have lighted my way have been kindness, beauty and truth."
— Albert Einstein

"I have tried to be a [wo]man of letters in love with ideas in order to be a wiser more loving person, hoping to leave the world just a little better than I found it."
— Cornel West

"A war of ideas can no more be won without books than a naval war can be won without ships. Books, like ships, have the toughest armor, the longest cruising range, and mount the most powerful guns."
— Franklin D. Roosevelt

"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."
— Chuck Klosterman

"Is there magic in this world? Certainly! But it is not the kind of magic written about in fantasy stories. It is the kind of magic that comes from ideas and the hard work it often takes to make them real. "
— Robert Fanney

"If librarianship is the connecting of people to ideas – and I believe that is the truest definition of what we do – it is crucial to remember that we must keep and make available, not just good ideas and noble ideas, but bad ideas, silly ideas, and yes, even dangerous or wicked ideas."
— Graceanne A. Decandido

""I can't understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I'm frightened of the old ones.""
— John Cage

"The danger is that in reaction to abuses and distortions of an idea, we'll reject it completely. And in the process miss out on the good of it, the worth of it, the truth of it."
— Rob Bell (Sex God: Exploring the Endless Connections Between Sexuality And Spirituality)

"Real life is physical. Give me books instead. Give me the invisibility of the contents of books, the thoughts, the ideas, the images. Let me become part of a book. . . . an intertextual being: a book cyborg, or, considering that books aren't cybernetic, perhaps a bibliorg."
— Scarlett Thomas (The End of Mr. Y)

"Your head is where ideas go to die!"
— Dilbert Comic Strip

"For books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a potency of life in them to be as active as that soul was whose progeny they are; nay, they do preserve as in a vial the purest efficacy and extraction of that living intellect that bred them."
— John Milton (Areopagitica)

"Books can ignite fires in your mind, because they carry ideas for kindling, and art for matches."
— Gary D. Schmidt (Lizzie Bright and the Buckminster Boy)

"I have learned that particularly clever ideas do not always stand up under close scrutiny."
— Elizabeth Peters (The Hippopotamus Pool)

"Some ideas are not born of logic and good sense. They are made of clouds and cobwebs. They sprout from nowhere and feed on excitement, sprinkled with adventure juice and the sweet flavor of the forbidden. The psyche moves from the realms of the ordinary and takes a delicate step towards the unknown. We know we shouldn't and that is exactly why we do."
— Brigid Lowry (Guitar Highway Rose)

"If I ever conceive any original idea, it will be because I have been abnormally prone to confuse ideas ... and I have thus found remote analogies and relations which others have not considered! Others rarely make these confusions, and proceed by precise analysis."
— Kenneth J.W. Craik

"Each voice carries a portion of value, no matter how unpalatable or distasteful that voice may be: no one person, government, ideology, transnational, or religious institution can own and dominate the whole."
— B.W. Powe (Towards a Canada of Light)

"I don't think that women ought to sit down at table with men. It ruins conversation and I'm sure it's very bad for them. It puts ideas in their heads, and women are never at ease with themselves when they have ideas."
— W. Somerset Maugham (Of Human Bondage)

"Don't worry about people stealing an idea. If it's original, you will have to ram it down their throats."
— Howard Aiken

"We live in a world in which people are censured, demoted, imprisoned, beheaded, simply because they have opened their mouths, flapped their lips, and vibrated some air. Yes, those vibrations can make us feel sad or stupid or alienated. Tough shit. That's the price of admission to the marketplace of ideas. Hateful, blasphemous, prejudiced, vulgar, rude, or ignorant remarks are the music of a free society, and the relentless patter of idiots is how we know we're in one. When all the words in our public conversation are fair, good, and true, it's time to make a run for the fence."
— Daniel Gilbert

"The quality of a play is the quality of its ideas."
— George Bernard Shaw

"Regimes planted by bayonets do not take root... Our military strength is a prerequisite to peace, but let it be clear we maintain this strength in the hope it will never be used, for the ultimate determinant in the struggle that's now going on in the world will not be bombs and rockets but a test of wills and ideas, a trial of spiritual resolve, the values we hold, the beliefs we cherish, the ideals to which we are dedicated."
— Ronald Reagan (The Quest for Peace, the Cause of Freedom)

"Ideas do not have to be correct in order to be good; its only necessary that, if they do fail, they do so in an interesting way. "
— Robert Rosen

"A new idea is delicate. It can be killed by a sneer or a yawn; it can be stabbed to death by a quip and worried to death by a frown on the right man’s brow."
— Charles Bower

"Epiphanies are found in the dirty, messy circuitous routes of practice."
— Jonathon Mead

"If you have an apple and I have an apple, and we exchange apples, we both still only have one apple. But if you have an idea and I have an idea, and we exchange ideas, we each now have two ideas."
— George Bernard Shaw

"“An army of principles will penetrate where an army of soldiers cannot. Neither the Channel nor the Rhine will arrest its progress. It will march on the horizon of the world and it will conquer.”


"
— Thomas Paine

"Talking about ideas for a novel is a bit like showing pictures of the ultrasound if you're pregnant. Until they're out in the world, they can only be wonderful to you."
— Clare Boylan

"Debería ser rico para tener una secretaria a la que dictar, mientras camino, porque las mejores ideas se me ocurren siempre cuando estoy lejos de la máquina."
— Henry Miller (Trópico de Cáncer)

"The more degrees of freedom there are in practice, the wider the discussion and debate can be."
— Thomas Newkirk (Holding On to Good Ideas in a Time of Bad Ones: Six Literacy Principles Worth Fighting For)

"...la buena literatura podía ser embriagadora sin renunciar al hilo conductor de las ideas. <Convicción personal de Stephen King>"
— Stephen King (On Writing)

"Without ideas, intelligence could not exist"
— Ornette Coleman

"Martial (the main character of LOCUS SOLUS) has a very interesting conception of literary beauty: the work must contain nothing real, no observations about the world or the mind, nothing but completely imaginary constructions. These are in themselves ideas from an extrahuman world.
"
— Pierre Janet

"There is something at the bottom of every new human thought, every thought of genius, or even every earnest thought that springs up in any brain, which can never be communicated to others, even if one were to write volumes about it and were explaining one's idea for thirty-five years; there's something left which cannot be induced to emerge from your brain, and remains with you forever; and with it you will die, without communicating to anyone perhaps the most important of your ideas."
— Fyodor Dostoevsky (The Idiot)

"Everything you possess of skill, and wealth, and handicraft,
wasn't it first merely a thought and a quest?"
— Mawlana Jalal-al-Din Rumi

"You have to remember that I was a bright but simple fellow from Canada who seldom, if ever, met another writer, and then only a so-called literary type that occasionally sold a story and meanwhile worked in an office for a living."
— A.E. Van Vogt