Creativity - ABRAHAM LINCOLN

Often an idea would occur to me which seemed to have force .... I have never let one of those ideas escape me, but wrote it on a scrap of paper and put it in that drawer. In that way I saved my best thoughts on the subject, and, you know, such things often come in a kind of intuitive way more clearly than if one were to sit down and deliberately reason them out. To save the results of such mental action is true intellectual economy .... Of course, in this instance, I had to arrange the material at hand and adapt it to the particular case presented.

ABRAHAM LINCOLN (1809 - 1865), Remarks to James F. Wilson, June 1862, In George Iles, ed., Autobiography, Greatest Americans, 1924.