Goodreads asked Nick Harkaway:

How do you get inspired to write?

Nick Harkaway Weeeeellllll, I get ideas the way you get hit by raindrops if you go outside in a storm. Some of them are good and if I'm lucky they collide with other ideas and then I have a story. Some of them are awful. Really, really awful. I sit bolt upright in bed and shout something about how I'm a genius and I write it all down and I wake in the morning to a note about how bananas are going to kill the King of Silesia and take over the world, and only a trained monkey called Newton, armed with a grocer's apron wrapped around the skull of a dead saint, can possibly save us. And I look at that and I have to admit that while it possesses the virtue of originality it is clearly crap.

But every so often ideas collide and produce something exciting, and then it's not a question of persuading myself to write, but of budgeting time to do other things like eat.

Where ideas come from... I think that's about taking the brakes off your mind. We're all trained as kids to stop thinking the ridiculous things and be sensible, and writing is about recapturing the possibility that there are invisible mousemonsters that sneak onto buses and chew the furniture and they are kept in line by a young woman with a magic accordion. It's about permitting yourself to touch the weird in search of the amazing.

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