“Anybody can have ideas—the difficulty is to express themwithout squandering a quire of paper on an idea thatought to be reduced to one glittering paragraph.”

“To get the right word in the right place is a rare achievement. To condense the diffused light of a page of thought into the luminous flash of a single sentence, is worthy to rank as a prize composition just by itself...Anybody can have ideas--the difficulty is to express them without squandering a quire of paper on an idea that ought to be reduced to one glittering paragraph.”

“I would rather have ideas and some difficulties of technique than a perfect technique and no ideas.”

“I have tried to express the idea that the café is a place where one can ruin oneself, go mad, or commit a crime.”

“As soon as . . . begins to mean anything to anyone they'll change it. The idea seems to be: use an expression only as long as it doesn't mean anything to anybody.”

“See all these buildings, Russell? All these buildings were once a drawing on a piece of paper, and before that they were an idea in someone’s head. Any idea that you have, you can make manifest.”