Where do I get my ideas from? You might as well have asked that of Beethoven. He was goofing around in Germany like everybody else, and all of a sudden this stuff came gushing out of him. It was music. I was goofing around like everybody else in Indiana, and all of a sudden stuff came gushing out. It was disgust with civilization.

Where do you get your ideas from, Ms Le Guin?” From forgetting Dostoyevsky and reading road signs backwards, naturally. Where else?

Language is the source of misunderstandings.

JOHN: I’ll tell you a story about myself. Do you mind? I was raised to think myself stupid. That’s what I want to tell you.

CAROL: What do you mean?

JOHN: Just what I said. I was brought up, and my earliest, and most persistent memories are of being told that I was stupid. “You have such intelligence. Why must you behave so stupidly?” Or, “Can’t you understand? Can’t you understand?” And I could not understand. I could not understand.

CAROL: What?

JOHN: The simplest problem. Was beyond me. It was a mystery.

CAROL: What was a mystery?

JOHN: How people learn. How I could learn. Which is what I’ve been speaking of in class. And of course, you can’t hear it. Carol. Of course, you can’t. (Pause) I used to speak of “real people,” and wonder what the real people did. The real people. Who were they? They were the people other than myself. The good people. The capable people. The people who could do the things, I could not do: learn, study, retain ... all that garbage – which is what I have been talking of in class, and that’s exactly what I have been talking of – If you are told ... Listen to this. If the young child is told, he cannot understand. Then he takes it as a description of himself. What am I? I am that which cannot understand. And I saw you out there, when we were speaking of the concepts of...

CAROL: I can’t understand any of them.

JOHN: Well, then, that’s my fault. That’s not your fault. And that is not verbiage. That’s what I firmly hold to be the truth. And I am sorry, and I owe you an apology.

Misunderstood! It is a right fool's word. Is it so bad then to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.

Impossible!” I said, without stopping to think that I was doubting the great Descartes. (It was a reaction I learned from my father: have no respect whatsoever for authority; forget who said it and instead look at what he starts with, where he ends up, and ask yourself, “Is it reasonable?”) I said, “How can you deduce one from the other?

I don't know exactly where ideas come from, but when I'm working well ideas just appear. I've heard other people say similar things - so it's one of the ways I know there's help and guidance out there. It's just a matter of our figuring out how to receive the ideas or information that are waiting to be heard.

I want to say
that wonderful ideas
can come from anywhere.
Sometimes you make a mistake,
or break something, or lose a hat, and the next
thing you know, you get a great idea.

How did he get his ideas? “I’m enough of an artist to draw freely on my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.

I must always forget how one word is able to pick out another, to manner another, until I have got something I might have said... but did not.

I begin with an idea and then it becomes something else.

Unknowing imitation is almost a recipe for bad design. If you don’t know where your ideas are coming from, you’re probably imitating an imitator.

Most of the time, because of their failure to fasten on to words, my thoughts remain misty and nebulous. They assume vague, amusing shapes and are then swallowed up: I promptly forget them.

The root difficulty in all cases was the state of being blind and deaf to words — not seeing the words for the prose. Being adults, they had forgotten what every child understands, which is giving and taking a meaning is not automatic and inevitable