“Opportunity ideas do not lie around waiting to be discovered. Such ideas need to be produced.”

If you do not design the future, someone or something else will design it for you.

An idea that is developed and put into action is more important than an idea that exists only as an idea.

Some people drift along like a cork on a river, feeling that they cannot do anything except drift, moment to moment. This is an attitude of mind. Everyone can be constructive even in tiny ways.

To be successful you have to be lucky, or a little mad, or very talented, or find yourself in a rapid growth field.

A characteristic of intuitive solutions and new ideas is that of being obvious once they are discovered.

Asking a question is the simplest way of focusing thinking asking the right question may be the most important part of thinking.

It is historical continuity that maintains most assumptions, not repeated assessment of their validity.

I do a great deal of work with young children, and if you give a child a problem, he may come up with a highly original solution, because he doesn’t have the established route to it.

It has always surprised me how little attention philosophers have paid to humor, since it is a more significant process of mind than reason. Reason can only sort out perceptions, but the humor process is involved in changing them.

Sometimes the situation is only a problem because it is looked at in a certain way. Looked at in another way, the right course of action may be so obvious that the problem no longer exists.

Possibilities play a much bigger role in thinking than most people believe. Without possibilities you cannot make progress.

It is well known that “problem avoidance” is an important part of problem solving. Instead of solving the problem you go upstream and alter the system so that the problem does not occur in the first place.

Argument is meant to reveal the truth, not to create it.

Everyone has the right to doubt everything as often as he pleases and the duty to do it at least once. No way of looking at things is too sacred to be reconsidered. No way of doing things is beyond improvement.

Complexity means distracted effort. Simplicity means focused effort.

Creativity and lateral thinking have exactly the same basis as humour.

Cell phones, mobile e-mail, and all the other cool and slick gadgets can cause massive losses in our creative output and overall productivity.

I aim to be content with what I produce. It’s an aim I never achieve, but I go over my work word by word, time and again, so as to be as little dissatisfied as possible.

The process is more important than the product

I’m a juvenile product of the working class, who’s best friend floats in the bottom of a glass.

We may say that life has borrowed from inanimate processes the same basic mechanism used in producing those striking structures that are crystals, with their beautiful plane faces.

The best computer is a man, and it’s the only one that can be mass-produced by unskilled labor.

The whole art of making experiments in chemistry is founded on the principle: we must always suppose an exact equality or equation between the principles of the body examined and those of the products of its analysis.

I love producing, writing. I rarely write with other writers unless I have a real great respect for them. Like Burt Bacharach, or Carole Sager, or Stevie Wonder. Somebody like Smokey – like that. Otherwise, I choose to write alone.