Jim Henson Quotes

Sometimes the best ideas I have are in my bathtub or in my bed or in my dreams early in the morning before waking up ... I'm like a TV antennae, I catch it all and do it my way.

Genius is rarely able to give any account of its own processes.

I do not 'get' ideas; ideas get me.

You feed yourself. Make sure you have all the information, whether it's aesthetic, scientific, mathematical, I don't care what it is. Then you walk away from it and let it ferment. You ignore it and pretend you don't care. Next thing you know, the answer comes.

In making movies, time is so short-because it is so expensive-that we tend to neglect the place from which the best ideas come, namely that part of ourselves that dreams. The unconscious is our best collaborator.

There is no prescribed route to follow to arrive at a new idea. You have to make the intuitive leap.

I sometimes don't try to invent something. I wait for some kind of a direction - and it happens. I get an angle, for instance, and it just appears, and I say, 'Oh my God - that's it!'

My insights come in periods of working. There are wonderful moments of surprise, but I'm superstitious enough not to want to talk about them.

The spiritual is the parent of the practical.

I would find myself laughing and wondering where these ideas came from. You can call it imagination, I suppose. But I was grateful for wherever they came from.

Some of the best ideas I get seem to happen when I'm doing mindless manual labor or exercise. I'm not sure how that happens, but it leaves me free for remarkable ideas to occur.

It is the mystery of the creative act that something other than our conscious self takes over.

The thing that I was brought up to prize above everything else is the intellect. There is no problem that the intellect cannot solve, but it never had an original thought. Originality is the realm of the unconscious.

I don't know how to explain it, but when you're working on something constantly, and you're digging in deep, things kind of fall in, and you grab them, and you're like, 'That one!' and 'That thing!' and it starts to build something right.

Sometimes ideas are coming so fast that I have to stop doing one song to get another. But I don't forget the first one. If it works, it will always be there. It's like the truth: it will find you and lift you up. And if it ain't right, it will dissolve like sand on the beach.

Sometimes the best ideas will come in the least inspiring places.

When we sit down to work, we become like a magnetized rod that attracts iron filings. Ideas come. Insights accrete.

We don't know where we get our ideas from. What we do know is that we do not get them from our laptops.

It often happens that things come into the mind in a more finished form than could have been achieved after much study.

We like the idea that the things we do seem to come out of nowhere.

Creativity - like human life itself - begins in darkness... bright ideas are preceded by a gestation period that is interior, murky, and completely necessary.

Usually, the best ideas come from other people's good ideas, which then, after a short gestation period, become your ideas.

What you can imagine depends on what you know.

Creativity is a scavenger hunt. It's your obligation to pay attention to clues, to the thing that gives you that little tweak.

The seed of the idea is developed by both labor and the unconscious, and the struggle that goes on between them.