In the “How to Read This Book” section of The Ode Less Travelled, Stephen Fry states three rules as ‘terms and conditions’ that readers must pledge to follow before proceeding:

1. Take your time
2. Don’t be afraid
3. Always have a notebook with you

Not a bad way to go about your day in general…

Bonus treat: Stephen Fry, in character with his comedic partner Hugh Laurie, expounds on language, beauty and ideas:

“…wheel within a wheel, like the circles that we find in the windmills of our mind…”

From “Honey Pie” by Haruki Murakami:

Sayako said, “To understand something and to put that something into a form you can see with your own eyes are two completely different things. If you could manage to do both equally well, though, living would be a lot simpler.”

Available in the collection After the Quake: Stories

I have some quibbles with some of his conclusions, but there are a few points worth culling from Merlin Mann’s speech at MacWorld this past January:

• “Creativity is a way of seeing the world, it is a way of behaving, it is a way of understanding how things that may seem unrelated could actually be related.”
• “When you become a professional creative person, having ideas is the least of your problems.”
• “Ideas are cheap, making them into something awesome is super-hard.”
• “Even if it’s just something you do as an avocation — for fun — it’s a job. It’s work.”
• “There’s stuff you want to do that you may not even realize you want to do.”

His general themes — that creative endeavours require work, sacrifice and blocks of uninterrupted time, and that there may be archetypal patterns to making ideas into something we can share and interact with — are spot on.

There’s also a video on YouTube but it’s 27 minutes, with technical difficulties and a fair bit of wandering jocularity, which is why I’m presenting a condensed version here.