A man would do well to carry a pencil in his pocket, and write down the thoughts of the moment. Those that come unsought for are commonly the most valuable, and should be secured, because they seldom return.

The thoughts that arrive unbidden, in the shower or halfway down a street, tend to be better than the ones you produce by sitting down and trying. They are also the ones you lose, because they arrive without warning and leave the same way, and the certainty that you will remember them is reliably false. Catching them costs almost nothing. Not catching them costs something you will never know the size of.

Keep whatever capture tool you will actually use within reach, a notebook, a phone note, a card in your pocket. When something arrives, write it down before you finish admiring it, in enough words to make sense tomorrow.