For me, inspiration is a spark out of nowhere, a leap of the imagination, often from a surprising source. I mostly get my inspiration from things unrelated to what I do. It's that moment of juxtaposition when the familiar meets the unfamiliar, the known meets the unknown, and your brain has to connect these things. If we make these inspirational connections, we can create things that spark people's imaginations.

I'm getting ideas all the time. They come from walking down the street, from watching a movie, from reading. I get a lot of sparks from reading. I'll be reading an article and I'll leap up and write something down. I have more ideas than I can execute. I keep a long "ideas" list that I categorize: film, clothing, graphics, and so on. These vary from grand ideas to little graphic things like "make something with sugar." I used to keep my list of ideas in little notebooks and scraps of paper all over, but now I usually enter them into a text file on my computer. Some of the ideas have been sitting there for years.

When I get a project, I usually have an idea right away or overnight. Sometimes if I'm desperate, I'll hunt through my list for the idea. But it usually pops into my head from some kind of logical or illogical association.

I guess what I do is have this mental and physical storehouse full of thoughts, words, and materials—and I'm always adding to it. I have more ideas than I'll be ever able to use.

I spend a lot of time thinking. It's really helpful for me. I was reading an article about the need for downtime and getting sleep. About how the time spent sitting around and staring at the sky is really important for people who need to be inspired, because they're always scram­bl­ing for ideas. I'm what some would call kind of lazy. I like tojust sit and stare at the forest, and that's when I get some of my best ideas.

My best ideas come from the way I live my life. If I feed my life, it will give me ideas when I need them.