Where Plot Ideas Come From Quotes

Where do writers get their ideas from? Anywhere and everywhere.
Nothing is sacred. ~ Darynda Jones

I do more writing by myself than with anybody else. My best thing is sitting ... around somewhere with a guitar, and having an idea. You never know where it'd come from. Songwriting is a God-given talent. ~ Charlie Daniels

In that realm you will know at last the good news: that your "devil" does not exist, that you are who you always thought you were-goodness and love. Your idea that you might be something else has come from an insane outer world, causing you to act insanely. An outer world of judgment and condemnation. Others have judged you, and from their judgments you have judged yourself. Now you want God to judge you, and I will not do it. ~ Neale Donald Walsch

Some people can sit and enjoy the view ... some people like to take photos to feel complete. I need to somehow possess it in some other way. I just have to somehow grasp it and take it home in a more fulsome way. It's where ideas come from. ~ Graeme Base

Some of the best ideas I've gotten for my act have come from comedians and not magicians. ~ Andrew Mayne

Knowing where you have come from is important in forming an idea of where you want to go. ~ Alexander Stille

The best ideas come unexpectedly from a conversation or a common activity like watering the garden. These can get lost or slip away if not acted on when they occur. ~ Ruth Asawa

The emergence of a hardware product from an African company marks a phase-change point for tech invention. The BRCK shows that great ideas can come from anywhere, that innovation comes from solving real problems with constrained resources. ~ Erik Hersman

The greatest inspiration, the most sublime ideas of living that have come down to humanity come from a higher realm, a happier realm, a place of pure dreams, a heaven of blessed notions. Ideas and infinite possibilities dwell there in absolute tranquility.
Before these ideas came to us they were pure, they were silent, and their life-giving possibilities were splendid. But when they come to our earthly realm they acquire weight and words. They become less.
The sweetest notions, ideas of universal love and justice, love for one another, or intuitions of joyful creation, these are all perfect in their heavenly existences. Any artist will tell you that ideas are happier in the heaven of their conception than on the earth of their realization. We should return to pure contemplation, to sweet meditation, to the peace of silent loving, the serenity of deep faith, to the stillness of deep waters. We should sit still in our deep selves and dream good new things for humanity. We should try and make those dreams real. We should keep trying to raise higher the conditions and possibilities of this world. Then maybe one day, after much striving, we might well begin to create a world justice and a new light on this earth that could inspire a ten-second silence of wonder – even in heaven. ~ Ben Okri

The actual rewards that come from arguing with other people have nothing to do with winning and losing. A good argument helps us refine our own ideas and discover where our reasoning is the weakest. Other people's opposition can help us turn our own half-formed ideas into clear assertions backed by solid reasoning. And setting our ideas and opinions against someone else's helps us know each other better, which makes us better friends. We get these benefits from arguments when we collaborate with a partner. We do not get them when we try to destroy an enemy. That is how non-zero-sum games work. ~ Michael Austin

I HAVE NO IDEA WHATS COMING NEXT OR WHERE IT WILL COME FROM; I ENJOY THE SURPRISE OF IT ALL. ~ Mandy Patinkin

In advanced societies it is not the race politicians or the "rights" leaders who create the new ideas and the new images of life and man. That role belongs to the artists and intellectuals of each generation. Let the race politicians, if they will, create political, economic or organizational forms of leadership; but it is the artists and the creative minds who will, and must, furnish the all important content. And in this role, they must not be subordinated to the whims and desires of politicians, race leaders and civil rights entrepreneurs whether they come from the Left, Right, or Center, or whether they are peaceful, reform, violent, non-violent or laissez-faire. Which means to say, in advanced societies the cultural front is a special one that requires special techniques not perceived, understood, or appreciated by political philistines. ~ Harold Cruse

Ideas can come from anywhere and at any time. The problem with making mental notes is that the ink fades very rapidly. ~ Rolf Smith

Ideas are easy to come by, they spring effortlessly out of the vacuity of the mind and cost nothing. When they are held and projected onto one's self or others they become a project. When the project is enacted it becomes the work, and when the work is completed it appears to be self-existent. Creation is the process of form manifesting from emptiness, where that which arises from the mind comes into existence. Yet the distance between conception and realisation may be enormous, as vast as the distance between the stars. ~ Robert Beer

If you come up with the original idea on your laptop, anything else is an embellishment of that idea. It's nice to have the option to mix inside a big studio, but at the end of the day, it comes from an original spark, which often happens while sitting on the couch. ~ Hudson Mohawke

I come from that society and there is a common thread, specifically family values - the idea that you do anything for your family, and the unconditional love for one's children. ~ Ednita Nazario

I base a deuteragonist on the best friend I never had. A lot of good ideas come from what I never had and cause my imagination to light up. ~ B.A. Gabrielle

I don't often know where my ideas come from. Maybe it's the fact that I'm obsessively regimented in my analysis, borderline autistic. But whether it's bond selection or asset allocation, we can do it better than just about anybody around. ~ Jeffrey Gundlach

But art and ideas come out of the passion and torment of experience: it is impossible to have a real relationship to the first if one's aim is to be protected from the second. ~ James Baldwin

I had come to believe that the ability to evaluate many ideas, many histories, many points of view, was at the heart of what it means to self-create. If I yielded now, I would lose more than an argument. I would lose custody of my own mind. This was the price I was being asked to pay, I understood that now. What my father wanted to cast from me wasn't a demon: it was me. ~ Tara Westover

Books are made out of books." - Cormac McCarthy Brian Eno, A Year With Swollen Appendices Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From David Byrne, How Music Works Mike Monteiro, Design Is a Job Kio Stark, Don't Go Back to School Ian Svenonius, Supernatural Strategies for Making a Rock 'n' Roll Group Sidney Lumet, Making Movies P.T. Barnum, The Art of Money Getting ~ Austin Kleon

I suppose even Dictators have their chummy moments, when they put their feet up and relax with the boys, but it was plain from the outset that if Roderick Spode had a sunnier side, he had not come with any idea of exhibiting it now. His manner was curt. One sensed the absence of the bonhomous note.
...
Here he laid a hand on my shoulder, and I can't remember when I have experienced anything more unpleasant. Apart from what Jeeves would have called the symbolism of the action, he had a grip like the bite of a horse.
"Did you say 'Oh yes?'" he asked.
"Oh no," I assured him. ~ P.G. Wodehouse

My best ideas almost always come from winding up in unexpected places and stumbling across things I never could have imagined in advance. ~ Damian Kulash

I like to mix the real and the imaginary. Sometimes it is characters inspired by real people I know or know of. Sometimes it is a named person from the common cultural dreamscape. And it is tricky, because they have a lot of associated ideas that come with them, and a lot of actual facts. ~ Dana Spiotta

You call a tree a tree, he said, and you think nothing more of the word. But it was not a 'tree' until someone gave it that name. You call a star a star, and say it is just a ball of matter moving on a mathematical course. But that is merely how you see it. By so naming things and describing them you are only inventing your own terms about them. And just as speech is invention about objects and ideas, so myth is invention about truth.
We have come from God (continued Tolkien), and inevitably the myths woven by us, though they contain error, will also reflect a splintered fragment of the true light, the eternal truth that is with God. Indeed only by myth-making, only by becoming a 'sub-creator' and inventing stories, can Man aspire to the state of perfection that he knew before the Fall. Out myths may be misguided, but they steer however shakily towards the true harbor, while materialistic 'progress' leads only to a yawning abyss and the Iron Crown of evil. ~ J.R.R. Tolkien

Young people don't even consider that it's a good idea to be out on the fringe, which is where good ideas come from. ~ Louis C.K.

Once I was asked be a seatmate on a trans-Pacific flight....what instruction he should give his fifteen-year-old daughters, who wanted to be a writer. [I said], "Tell your daughter three things." Tell her to read...Tell her to read whatever interests her, and protect her if someone declares what she's reading to be trash. No one can fathom what happens between a human being and written language. She may be paying attention to things in the words beyond anyone else's comprehension, things that feed her curiosity, her singular heart and mind. ...Second, I said, tell your daughter that she can learn a great deal about writing by reading and by studying books about grammar and the organization of ideas, but that if she wishes to write well she will have to become someone. She will have to discover her beliefs, and then speak to us from within those beliefs. If her prose doesn't come out of her belief, whatever that proves to be, she will only be passing along information, of which we are in no great need. So help her discover what she means.
Finally, I said, tell your daughter to get out of town, and help her do that. I don't necessarily mean to travel to Kazakhstan, or wherever, but to learn another language, to live with people other than her own, to separate herself from the familiar. Then, when she returns, she will be better able to understand why she loves the familiar, and will give us a fresh sense of how fortunate we are to share these things.
Read. Find out ~ Barry Lopez

And I tell you one thing, if the primates that we came from, had know that someday politicians would come out of the gene pool, they would have stayed up in the trees and written evolution off as a bad idea. ~ John Sheridan

People ask me all the time, "Where do your ideas come from?" So, to clear up this question ... I keep my ideas inside the mind of a tiny man who is tied up in my closet! ~ C.K. Webb

In my own version of the idea of 'what art wants,' the end and fulfillment of the history of art is the philosophical understanding of what art is, an understanding that is achieved in the way that understanding in each of our lives is achieved, namely, from the mistakes we make, the false paths we follow, the false images we have come to abandon until we learn wherein our limits consist, and then how to live within those limits. ~ Arthur Danto

Even the best critical writing on Emily Dickinson underestimates her. She is frightening. To come to her directly from Dante, Spenser, Blake, and Baudelaire is to find her sadomasochism obvious and flagrant. Birds, bees, and amputated hands are the dizzy stuff of this poetry. Dickinson is like the homosexual cultist draping himself in black leather and chains to bring the idea of masculinity into aggressive visibility. ~ Camille Paglia