Ideas for gadgets for the disabled were coming into my head so fast they seemed to be arriving from somewhere outside of me, beamed down by an unremitting force. I had little control over them, or their flow. I would wake up in the middle of the night. A blinding flash of an idea would rouse me from my bed and I'd rush down to my workshop to have a go at it before the inspiration dimmed.

The key to success is to risk thinking unconventional thoughts. Convention is the enemy of progress.

I was on automatic pilot; ideas for gadgets kept coming, fed by a force of energy flowing through me and around me.

All inventors, they say, are a little mad. I reckon that only completely sane people are willing to admit they are slightly crazy.

I'd work eighteen-hour stretches and fall asleep in my clothes. Then I'd wake up in the middle of the night, brew a pot of tea, and start work again. I was tired, but work had become pure enjoyment.

The notion that inventors are anorak-wearing crackpots with glasses held together with Sellotape is beguiling but wrong.

As long as you've got slightly more perception than the average wrapped loaf, you could invent something.