Writing and the Creative Life: Boundaries of Space, Boundaries of Time

“What if in the face of our hectic lives, we claimed our creative time to be our own ‘sacred space?’”

We know John Cleese from Monty Python’s Flying Circus and Fawlty Towers, but he has also emerged as something of an authority on creativity. Here is an excerpt from a presentation he gave in Belgium some years ago:

Here is a transcript of the main part of his talk:

People often say, Where do you get your ideas from? And I say I get them from a Mr. Ken Levingshore who lives in Swinden, he sends them to me every Monday morning on a postcard. I once asked Ken where he gets his ideas from, and he gets them from a lady called Mildred Spong who lives on the Isle of Wight. He once asked Mildred where she gets her ideas from and she refused to say. So the point is, we don’t know. This is terribly important. We don’t know where we get our ideas from. What we do know is we do not get them from our laptops.

In fact, we get our ideas from what I’m going to call for the moment, our unconscious, the part of our mind that goes on working, for example, when we’re asleep.

What I’m saying is, if you get into the right mood, then your mode of…