The greatest killer of creativity is interruption. It pulls your mind away from what you want to be thinking about. Research has shown that, after an… - John Cleese

It's not the despair, Laura. I can take the despair. It's the hope I can't stand. ~ Brian Stimpson, Clockwise

So I explained to Connie that she needed to send a green light by, for example, talking about her father in a relaxed manner for a few seconds; then, I said, the queries about him would start flooding in. But what struck me as so odd was that I had been acting on this understanding all my life without ever having brought it to consciousness. As the French (and the Paraguayans) say, “A fish does not know the water that it swims in.” And eighteen years later, when I was writing A Fish Called Wanda, I used this realisation, when Archie is trying to explain to Wanda the social straitjacket from which he is desperate to escape: Wanda, do you have any idea what it’s like being English? Being so correct all the time, being so stifled by this dread of, of doing the wrong thing, of saying to someone, “Are you married?” and hearing, “My wife left me this morning,” or saying, “Do you have children?” and being told they all burned to death on Wednesday. You see, Wanda, we’re all terrified of embarrassment. That’s why we’re so … dead. Most of my friends are dead, you know; we have these piles of corpses to dinner.

"I guess we're all thinking how sad it is that a man of such talent, of such capability for kindness, of such unusual intelligence, should now so suddenly be spirited away ... Well, I feel that I should say, "Nonsense. Good riddance to him, the freeloading bastard, I hope he fries!" And the reason I feel I should say this is he would never forgive me if I didn't, if I threw away this glorious opportunity to shock you all on his behalf. Anything for him, but mindless good taste."