Concentration intensifies awareness

p.307

All-out intent begets an all-around awareness which also helps us creatively.  I have often admired the alertness of the Abercrombie and Fitch windows in New York.  There is almost always something in them that makes us stop and gaze.  For instance, during wartime I noticed people packed three deep peering at one of the displays, so I wedged my way through.  The magnet was nothing but a hunk of rag with a little card saying: "This piece of cloth came from a parachute of a bomb that devastated a large section of London."

In my newspaper days, such awareness was known as a "nose for news" and is still the distinguishing mark of star reporters.  But even a chemist can set himself apart by developing the same power.

The deferment-of-judgment principle

p. 127

Here's what Schiller wrote: "The reason for your complaint lies, it seems to me, in the constraint which your intellect imposes upon your imagination.  Here I will make an observation and illustrate it by an allegory.  Apparently it is not good - and indeed it hinders the creative work of the mind - if the intellect examines too closely the ideas already pouring in, as it were, at the gates.

Regarding in isolation, an idea may be quite insignificant and venturesome in the extreme; but it may acquire importance from an idea which follows it.  Perhaps, in a certain collection with other ideas which may seem equally absurd, it may be capable of furnishing a very serviceable link.  The intellect cannot judge all these ideas unless it can retain them until it has considered them in connection with these other ideas.

In the case of a creative mind, it seems to me, the intellect has withdrawn its watchers from the gates, and the ideas rush in pell-mell, and only then does it review and inspect the multitude.  You worthy critics, or whatever may call yourselves, are ashamed or afraid of the momentary and passing madness which is found in all real creators, the longer or shorter duration of which distinguishes the thinking artist from the dreamer.  Hence your complaints of unfruitfulness, for you reject too soon and discriminate too severely."