“What interests me about thoughts is not the moment when it crystallizes into formal ideas but its earlier stages.”

Variant: Do you know that one of the great problems of our age is that we are governed by people who care more about feelings than they do about thoughts and ideas.
Source: Margaret Thatcher

Ideas, p. 23
Catching the Big Fish (2006)
Context: An idea is a thought. It's a thought that holds more than you think it does when you receive it. But in that first moment there is a spark. In a comic strip, if someone gets an idea, a lightbulb goes on. It happens in an instant, just as in life.
It would be great if the entire film came all at once. But it comes, for me, in fragments. That first fragment is like the Rosetta stone. It's the piece of the puzzle that indicates the rest. It's a hopeful puzzle piece.
In Blue Velvet, it was red lips, green lawns, and the song — Bobby Vinton's version of "Blue Velvet". The next thing was an ear lying in a field. And that was it.
You fall in love with the first idea, that little tiny piece. And once you've got it, the rest will come in time.

Quoted in Huffington Post http://www.huffingtonpost.com/joshua-schwartz/in-the-beginning-there-was-not_b_1703387.html

as quoted in From Rebel to Rabbi: Reclaiming Jesus and the Making of Modern Jewish Culture, Matthew B. Hoffman; Stanford University Press, 2007, p. 219
after 1930

Time magazine (27 October 1975)

page 96
The World of Prayer, vol. 2

Source: The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms (2010), p. 3

Variant: There are thoughts which are prayers. There are moments when, whatever the posture of the body, the soul is on its knees.