One of the most-asked questions of authors is “Where do you get your ideas?”

My answer is “from everywhere”—from my memories, dreams (particularly the bad ones), from movies (the computer HAL in 2001 Space Odyssey) and the theater (imagine Jekyll & Hyde).

Ideas also come while dining in a restaurant, particularly alone—sitting at the same table at the now closed Le Perigord, where Richard Burton & Elizabeth Taylor, and a deposed Richard Nixon, once dined. Or having a glass of champagne at the Bar Hemingway inside the Paris Ritz, liberated by Hemingway himself after the Nazis fled Paris. Imagine having a martini at Pete’s Tavern, where O. Henry sat and wrote. Somehow, these places and their histories stimulate my thinking.

Or . . . was it just the martini?

Traveling is another source of inspiration. Paris seems to unlock my imagination, as it did with so many legendary writers like Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and James Joyce. So do Rome and Florence. These are the settings, the locations for my own novels now.

Real life is a powerful source of ideas, often stranger than fiction. Hitchcock said that “drama is life with the dull bits cut out.” Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn was based upon the character of a beloved childhood friend of Twain’s, so having colorful friends helps, too.

Stephen King said of Misery that “like the ideas for some of my other novels, that came to me in a dream . . ..”

Speaking of dreams, there is one place where I get some of my most vivid and interesting ideas: it’s in that time and place somewhere between being awake and being asleep, during those restless minutes or hours during the night when I’m turning over in bed, about to fall back to sleep.

The fact that many writers are unable to articulate exactly where their ideas come from suggests that some of the best ideas come from the unconscious mind. I often wonder what else is lurking inside there.