My idea about collections is that you write as hard as you can for some period and what you're really doing during that time is hyper-focusing on the individual pieces - trying to make each one sit up and really do some surprising work.

Twitter is a deliberate abstention. Somehow I hate the idea of there always being, in the back of my mind, this little voice saying: 'Oh, I should tweet about this.'

I was raised Catholic,I took from that was a sense of theater and drama, and also the idea that there were truths that couldn't actually be uttered directly but really had to be reached through ritual. You come out of those Masses so moved, and you're like, "Why did that happen?" And the truth of it is that it happened through an hour of highly enacted ritual.

I love story-writing because I can (more or less, on occasion) actually DO it. That's really the truth. I like the idea that a story is sort of a site for making cool language effects - a site for celebrating language, and, therefore, the world. And the brevity is part of the challenge. I like stories because I get them - I know how to make beauty, or something like beauty, in that mode.

If you want to explore a political idea in the highest possible way, you embody it in the personal, because that's something that no one can deny.

So for me the approach has become to go into a story not really sure of what I want to say, try to find some little seed crystal of interest, a sentence or an image or an idea, and as much as possible divest myself of any deep ideas about it. And then by this process of revision, mysteriously it starts to accrete meanings as you go.

Genius is in the idea. Impact, however, comes from action!

The responsibility of leadership is not to come up with all the ideas but to create an environment in which great ideas can thrive.

Follow those who follow something bigger than themselves - an idea, a belief, a vision, a cause. Run away from those who say we need to follow them.

The best ideas are the honest ones. Ones born out of personal experience. Ones that originated to help a few but ended up helping many.

The next time someone starts listing all the reasons an idea won't work or can't happen, ask them to give 3 reasons it can.

What good is an idea if it remains an idea? Try. Experiment. Iterate. Fail. Try again. Change the world.

Simple ideas are easier to understand. Ideas that are easier to understand are repeated. Ideas that are repeated change the world.

If you want to achieve anything in this world, you have to get used to the idea that not everyone will like you.

New ideas need audiences like flowers need bees. No matter how bright and colorful, they will die unless others work to spread them

It's ok if others share our ideas as long as they build upon them. It's called progress.

Humility, I have learned, must never be confused with meekness. Humility is being open to the ideas of others.

It's always the organizations that are resource constrained that come up with the good ideas to win.

You are an explorer, and you represent our species, and the greatest good you can do is to bring back a new idea, because our world is endangered by the absence of good ideas. Our world is in crisis because of the absence of consciousness.

Our world is endangered by the absence of good ideas

The creative act is a letting down of the net of human imagination into the ocean of chaos on which we are suspended, and the attempt to bring out of it ideas.

My normal lectures deal with the psychedelic experience as a generalized and historical phenomenon, but this effort at communication is slightly more personal in that it's an effort to impart [just] one idea that came out of an involvement with psychedelic substances.

Since the very beginning of culture, what we seem to be are animals which take in raw material and excrete it imprinted with ideas.

My idea of enlightenment is when ego and Tao are fused, and Tao is perceived as ego. Then everything happens with complete appropriateness.