One of the answers is that very often I see a statement made by somebody which clearly to me is wrong, and then I work out what is the real right answer, and this happens to me very often.

In my early twenties I wrote quite a lot of a very bad novel called The Private Joke. I regularly abandoned it for months at a time to write other things, then picked it up again. Part of the manuscript was sitting up in the luggage rack when, aged 25, I was travelling by train from Manchester to London, and the idea for a very different kind of book hit me: that of a boy who didn’t realise he was a wizard, and was taken off to magic school.

Sometimes a title might occur to me. And a title will just stick out in my mind. And then I will think in terms, everything I think of I will think in terms of that title. For instance, I did a painting called Four New Clear Women . It meant, if women became powerful, and they are, like women who own large stock in the stock market, or become president like Golda Meir or Margaret Thatcher or Indira Gandhi, will they be “New Clear Women” or “Nuclear Women?” Will they blow us up, or are they smart? Something like that. So, then I met — there was this actress named Liv Ullmann, and she started painting. And she said, “Oh, what are you going to do next?” And I said, “I’m going to do The Persistence of Electrical Nymphs in Space .” And she said, “Oh, what’s that about?” and I said, “Well, that’s the sound of all the souls after the earth blows up.” And she says, “Oh, yeah.” That was very… she probably talked with Ingmar Bergman about that. But that was great. So those are titles that I would think about, before I would start working.

Then I had another thought: Physics disgusts me a little bit now, but I used to enjoy doing physics.  Why did I enjoy it?  I used to play with it.  I used to do whatever I felt like doing—it didn’t have to do with whether it was important for the development of nuclear physics, but whether it was interesting and amusing for me to play with.