If you want to have good ideas you must have many ideas. Most of them will be wrong, and what you have to learn is which ones to throw away.
It is not once nor twice but times without number that the same ideas make their appearance in the world.
To be fertile in hypotheses is the first perquisite of creativity and to be willing to throw them away the moment experience contradicts them is the next.
In doing everything, from coming up with the ideas and putting them on paper till doing the final edits, you are always thinking the next three steps, you're always thinking what next, what next, what next?
I get an idea about something. I just start thinking about it, and then I get onstage and I talk about it, and then I think about it some more and talk about it some more, and think about it some more and talk about it some more, until it starts to take a shape.
The really good idea is always traceable back quite a long way, often to a not very good idea which sparked off another idea that was only slightly better, which somebody else misunderstood in such a way that they then said something which was really rather interesting.
I'm a big believer in pose some questions and then answer a few of them before you move onto the next set of questions.
Sometimes I do that quite a lot, go back and forth a lot between ideas. Try things out.
When you have a system, you kind of get in a routine of what's important. And then you spend a lot more time on thinking of things that would make it better.
I always work out of uncertainty but when a painting's finished it becomes a fixed idea, apparently a final statement. In time though, uncertainty returns... your thought process goes on.
