Professor at Large: The Cornell Years

No meeting is possible without reciprocal affection. If the Work seeks to enter into a man’s understanding, it would be unable to do so if there’s nothing reciprocal coming from the man. Real conjunction with the Work needs affection before it can happen. Affection is that which opens while non-affection shuts.

The entertainment business is really about one thing—the next job—because we all want to stay close to the fire.

So when we need to innovate, to create, we need to access our tortoise mind. And that involves nothing more complicated than giving ourselves permission to stop trying so hard. To forget for the moment what kind of answer we think we want and just let our brains go soft and chew over a problem in a slightly contemplative, open-minded way, to let th

But I have never known what I want to do. All I know is that I want to do the next project. Do you see what I mean?

Christ clearly was a mystic. I mean, there’s not the slightest doubt about that. And the question I would ask is, why did I—growing up ten years in the Church of England—why did I hear so little of mysticism, given that Christ was a mystic? I mean, I never considered this puzzle properly until I found a series of lectures given by Aldous Huxley in

I think that if you are going to be a writer, what you’ve got to accept is that you have to create huge chunks of writing time when you don’t do anything else because the sad thing is, writing doesn’t really happen until it becomes obsessive, until it begins to take you over and nag at you. And I think you have to decide: am I prepared to pay that

But the great thing about realizing that things are completely hopeless is that you start to relax. Next, your aims become

So you also need to make sure that your tortoise enclosure is one in which your ego, and everyone else’s, feels safe, in which it’s absolutely clear that everyone in the room is treating what everyone else says, or doesn’t say, with friendly, uncritical curiosity.

SMITH: So do you find it any easier to be creative now? CLEESE: Well, I know how to facilitate it now. It’s all about creating a space. Space is exactly the right word. That means you have to create boundaries—of time and of space. So first, you have to find a place where you can just be quiet. If you’ve got an office with a secretary, you say to t