When others’ obsessions are not ours, we are sad for them, and we talk of how empty their lives will be if they don’t achieve their empty goal: the gymnastics prize, the firm partnership. But there is a monomania in which it is the focus, the sense of transport, that is the real pleasure.

Nonetheless, writing regularly, inspiration or no, is not a bad way to eventually get into an inspired mood; the plane has to bump along the runway for a while before it finally takes off.

Several factors besides skill are more significant in professional writers than in most amateurs. One is love of the surface level of language: the sound of it; the taste of it on the tongue; what it can be made to do in virtuosic passages that exist only for their own sake, like cadenzas in baroque concerti. Writers in love with their tools are not unlike surgeons obsessed with their scalpels, or Arctic sled racers who sleep among their dogs even when they don’t have to.

The drive to write produces a first draft; it is the drive to write well that produces the second, third, twentieth. Thus.

It’s no fun feeling your thoughts are being controlled by an electrode, and someone else is holding the clicker.

The mania is like wasps under the skin, like my head’s going to explode with ideas.

A creative idea will be defined simply as one that is both novel and useful or influential in a particular social setting.

Several factors besides skill are more significant in professional writers than in most amateurs. One is love of the surface level of language: the sound of it; the taste of it on the tongue; what it can be made to do in virtuosic passages that exist only for their own sake, like cadenzas in baroque concerti. Writers in love with their tools are not unlike surgeons obsessed with their scalpels, or Arctic sled racers who sleep among their dogs even when they don't have to.

It's no fun feeling your thoughts are being controlled by an electrode, and someone else is holding the clicker.

Neurology and psychiatry should be treating the same organ.