What writers have known for centuries, scientists are now endeavouring to prove: that contact with nature can boost creativity… Backpackers who spent four days in the wilderness without access to electronic devices scored 50 per cent better on a creativity test at the end of the trip, according to researchers.

The only real failure is the failure to try. The measure of success is how we cope with disappointment.

Don’t tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.

The only way to remain creative is to understand the new and listen to the young.

Inspiration is a guest that does not willingly visit the lazy.

I don’t know the key to success, but the key to failure is trying to please everybody.

If you can keep finding new challenges, then you can think like a young person even when you’re old and gray. That idea gives me hope.

[Research shows that] … the ideal amount of college for a creative career is two years of undergraduate work. After that, school seems to actually inhibit the imagination.

I quickly came to realise that people who succeed are very much like everyone else, except in one area: THEY TRY THINGS.

We know that in offices where people don’t talk, creativity is lower. Ideas, as the writer Matt Ridley has put it, need a place to ‘have sex’.