"I have never listened to anyone who criticized my taste in space travel, sideshows or gorillas. When this occurs, I pack up my dinosaurs and leave the room."

Ray Bradbury (via libraryland)

(via gatsbylives)

"Have a good idea and then feel guilty every day you waste not working on it."

How to be a writer, from Where do ideas come from? by Kate Pullinger.

"The advice I like to give young artists, or really anybody who’ll listen to me, is not to wait around for inspiration. Inspiration is for amateurs; the rest of us just show up and get to work. If you wait around for the clouds to part and a bolt of lightning to strike you in the brain, you are not going to make an awful lot of work. All the best ideas come out of the process; they come out of the work itself. Things occur to you. If you’re sitting around trying to dream up a great art idea, you can sit there a long time before anything happens. But if you just get to work, something will occur to you and something else will occur to you and somthing else that you reject will push you in another direction. Inspiration is absolutely unnecessary and somehow deceptive. You feel like you need this great idea before you can get down to work, and I find that’s almost never the case."

Chuck Close (via sandyhong & @emilycarroll)

(via drawnblog)

"An idea you have might not be original. But by creating a novel out of that idea you can make it original."

Umberto Eco (You can substitute other words for “novel” like “song” or “painting.”)

(Source: theparisreview, via austinkleon)

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petervidani:

Aaron Staton and Rich Sommer checking out Tumblr on the set of Mad Men.

This gives me an idea for a dream blog, called “In Costume Out of Character,” that consists of nothing more than images of people in period clothes, in period settings, doing non-period things. A pre-Revolution French aristocrat sits in full dress, complete with wig, typing out love poems on her typewriter. These 1960s businessmen, suited up, hair slicked, watch a movie on a MacBook. Two 4th-century Huns sit engrossed in a game of Battleship. Who wants to help make this happen?

"A ton of writers I know, and I include myself in that category, if you see them at a party texting someone, they are actually not texting. They are saving a piece of overheard conversation that they want to keep. Or they are noting down an idea."

Rosecrans Baldwin, Novelist - Writers on Process (via)