When I start on a book, I have been thinking about it and making occasional notes for some time... So I have lots of theme, locale, subjects and technical ideas... I don't worry about long periods of not doing anything. I know my subconscious is busy.
Interpretation
Creativity often requires patience, and the subconscious plays a vital role in the process.
This quote emphasizes the importance of the subconscious mind in the creative process. Arthur C. Clarke suggests that even during periods of inactivity, ideas and themes are being developed beneath the surface. He highlights the significance of preparation and thought that occurs before actively writing, suggesting that creativity is not just about immediate action but also about allowing ideas to simmer over time.
In practice
This quote can be shared in a workshop about creative writing to emphasize the value of patience in the creative process.
Nowhere in space will we rest our eyes upon the familiar shapes of trees and plants, or any of the animals that share our world. Whatsoever life we meet will be as strange and alien as the nightmare creatures of the ocean abyss, or of the insect empire whose horrors are normally hidden from us by their microscopic scale.
As our own species is in the process of proving, one cannot have superior science and inferior morals. The combination is unstable and self-destroying.
It has yet to be proven that intelligence has any survival value.
The best measure of a man's honesty isn't his income tax return. It's the zero adjust on his bathroom scale.
It was the mark of a barbarian to destroy something one could not understand.
My favorite definition of an intellectual: 'Someone who has been educated beyond his/her intelligence'.
There's nothing worse than being an aging young person.
It's unbelievable how much you don't know about the game you've been playing all your life.
Although the masters make the rules for the wise men and the fools, I've got nothing, Ma, to live up to.
There is but one coward on earth, and that is the coward that dare not know.
I thought they were helping me. I was so full of trust in them that I felt grateful as they carried me in the air. Only when they threw me overboard did I begin to have doubts.
People know, or dimly feel, that if thinking is not kept pure and keen, and if respect for the world of mind is no longer operative, ships and automobiles will soon cease to run right, the engineer's slide rule and the computations of banks and stock exchanges will forfeit validity and authority, and chaos will ensue.
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