I do like group invention. I think there's really nothing more fun than sitting at a whiteboard with a group of smart people and spitballing and coming up with new ideas and objections to those ideas, and then solutions to the objections and going back and forth.

In Science, it is when we take some interest in the great discoverers and their lives that it becomes endurable, and only when we begin to trace the development of ideas that it becomes fascinating.

At Microsoft there are lots of brilliant ideas but the image is that they all come from the top - I'm afraid that's not quite right.

I mean, just because you're a musician doesn't mean all your ideas are about music. So every once in a while I get an idea about plumbing, I get an idea about city government, and they come the way they come.

All there is to writing is having ideas. To learn to write is to learn to have ideas.

An idea is a feat of association, and the height of it is a good metaphor.