Brewster Ghiselin is Professor Emeritus of English and Doctor of Humane Letters H.C. at the University of Utah.
Summary
This unique anthology brings together material from 38 well-known writers, artists, and scientists who attempt
to describe the process by which original ideas come to them. Contributors include Albert Einstein, Wolfgang
Amadeus Mozart, Amy Lowell, Rudyard Kipling, Max Ernst, Katherine Anne Porter, Henry Miller, Carl Gustav Jung,
Mary Wigman, Yasuo Kuniyoshi, Henri Poincaré and many others.
"Art is a kind of innate drive that seizes a human being and makes him its instrument. To perform this
difficult office it is sometimes necessary for him to sacrifice happiness and everything that makes life worth
living for the ordinary human being."
--Carl G. Jung
"I began in absolute chaos and darkness, in a bog or swamp of ideas and emotions and experiences. Even now
I do not consider myself a writer, in the ordinary sense of the word. I am a man telling the story of his life,
a process which appears more and more inexhaustible as I go on. . . . It is a turning inside out, a voyaging through
X dimensions, with the result that somewhere along the way one discovers that what one has to tell is not nearly
so important as the telling itself."
