Tim Hardy

It is absolutely clear that, by his activity, man changes the forms of the materials of nature in such a way as to make them useful to him. The form of wood, for instance, is altered if a table is made out of it. Nevertheless the table continues to be wood, an ordinary, sensuous thing. But as soon as it emerges as a commodity, it changes into a thing which transcends sensuousness. It not only stands with its feet on the ground, but, in relation to all other commodities, it stands on its head, and evolves out of its wooden brain grotesque ideas, far more wonderful than if it were to begin dancing of its own free will.

Das Kapital, Karl Marx

At a demented research institute named for William Morris, eager eyes gaze at a computer that can handle UHL, or “Unit Headline Language”. A survey is conducted, in which people are shown the random headlines:
ROW HOPE MOVE FLOP
LEAK DASH SHOCK
HATE BAN BID PROBE
A total of 86.4 % of those responding say that they understand the headlines, though of this total a depressing number cannot quite say why.

(Michael Frayn, The Tin Men.)

Christopher Hitchens’s : Fleet Street’s finest is a hilarious round-up of the portrayals of journalists by novelists.

The above extract reminds me of the newspaper headlines and advertising catchlines in Russell Hoban’s Kleinzeit, a great comic novel that deserves to be better known.

You get ideas from daydreaming. You get ideas from being bored. You get ideas all the time. The only difference between writers and other people is we notice when we’re doing it.

You get ideas when you ask yourself simple questions. The most important of the questions is just, What if…?

(What if you woke up with wings? What if your sister turned into a mouse? What if you all found out that your teacher was planning to eat one of you at the end of term - but you didn’t know who?)

Neil Gaiman on inspiration