The whole idea of celebrity is flattering - it helps you get into restaurants and stuff - but once you obtain some creative fulfillment, which you do on a nightly basis as a comedian, it's hard to give that up just to be the wacky neighbor on a show.

There are some people who know who I am but there are a lot of people that have no idea who I am - which is not to say that that's a bad thing.

You're on stage and because stand-up comedy is one of the few meritocracies in the entertainment industry, there's some kind of - at least for me, there's some kind of idea of control.

I was looking at a bottle of water; they have nutritional facts printed on the side. You know, I'm no chemist, but I have a rough idea what's in water.

I wouldn't say that comedy brought me away from it.I think that my idea of faith was another obligation in my life.

We don't know where we get our ideas from. What we do know is that we do not get them from our laptops.

The trouble with the British is that they are not interested in ideas. If Jesus came back today and offered to speak for an hour on British television, they would say, "What! Another talking head?

Most of the bad taste I've been accused of has been generic bad taste; it's been making fun of an idea as opposed to a person.

If I can get you to laugh with me, you like me better, which makes you more open to my ideas. And if I can persuade you to laugh at the particular point I make, by laughing at it you acknowledge its truth.

The really good idea is always traceable back quite a long way, often to a not very good idea which sparked off another idea that was only slightly better, which somebody else misunderstood in such a way that they then said something which was really rather interesting.

We have this idea that we need to be in the mood to write. We don't.

Our modern ideas of 'functioning' through things are really quite inhuman. We have this idea that no matter what is going on we still have to color between the lines, act normal.

Nothing dies harder than a bad idea.

It is on these (20min) walks that my best ideas come to me. It is while walking that difficult clarity emerges. It is while walking that I experience a sense of well-being and connection, and it is in walking that I live most prayerfully.

Nothing dies harder than a bad idea. And few ideas are worse than the ones we have about art.

Creativity - like human life itself - begins in darkness... bright ideas are preceded by a gestation period that is interior, murky, and completely necessary.

All too often too often we try to push, pull, outline and control our ideas instead of letting them grow organically. The creative process is a process of surrender, not control.Mystery is at the heart of creativity. That, and surprise.

Creativity is a spiritual issue.

Other things equal, a life filled with complex flow activities is more worth living than one spent consuming passive entertainment.

For original ideas to come about, you have to let them percolate under the level of consciousness in a place where we have no way to make them obey our own desires or our own direction. Their random combinations are driven by forces we don't know about.

Produce as many ideas as possible. Try to produce unlikely ideas.

Today many American corporations spend a great deal of money and time trying to increase the originality of their employees, hoping thereby to get a competitive edge in the marketplace. But such programs make no difference unless management also learns to recognize the valuable ideas among the many novel ones, and then finds ways of implementing them.

Creativity is any act, idea, or product that changes an existing domain, or that transforms an existing domain into a new one What counts is whether the novelty he or she produces is accepted for inclusion in the domain.

I have devoted 30 years of research to how creative people live and work, to make more understandable the mysterious process by which they come up with new ideas and new things. If I had to express in one word what makes their personalities different from others, it's complexity. They show tendencies of thought and action that in most people are segregated. They contain contradictory extremes; instead of being an individual, each of them is a multitude.