Quotes About Innovation

I love working with an orchestra, but there are many ways to make music.

From early on, when synthesizers were first introduced into music, I liked the idea that you could get a big sound with them, electronic, but like an orchestra. And I could play it all myself. That was exciting.

I feel I'm most successful when I'm playing a concert, and it doesn't necessarily seem like I'm playing a saxophone but am coming off more like an orchestra or something like that.

People talk very much about, 'What can we do with the orchestra in the 21st century?' We should think about the 21st century, of course.

'Geronimo' was a huge amount of work. That involved 80-piece orchestras and Indians and Tuvans and all kinds of crazy people on that thing. That's a real circus, that score.

We're more about other things over odd timings: orchestration, composition, horn/vocal arrangements - that's where we get super weird.

I've learned a lot from the masters of orchestration, like Ravel and Stravinsky.

When I came to New York, I told everyone I was a writer/director, and they said, 'No.' There was a rule. You could be one or the other. They ordained me writer. But then I won the Obie for directing 'Spunk,' and the rules changed.

Growth comes from chaos, not order.

This has always been a motto of mine: Attempt the impossible in order to improve your work.

You have to have a cultural ethic that allows for making mistakes. It cannot be that just because you make mistakes, you're out. You have to make mistakes in order to innovate.

I think in order to keep America great, we have to keep America creative.

We have to evolve, we have to change, and in order to do that, we have to initiate the change.

Everybody believed you had to have a big piece of lumber and then muscle the ball over the fence. But by the time I and Hank Aaron - another guy who did it with his wrists - were through, there were a lot of guys ordering light bats and playing handball.

Ordering food has not changed for 30 or 40 years.

We have developed overlays for the keys of the cash registers with the help of the Braille Institute, so that blind crew members can take orders and help our guests.

Space only becomes ordinary when the frontier is no longer being breached.

If you really see how many live shows are going on... you can start to do things that are out of the ordinary.

As an actor, you are always looking for something fresh and interesting and not ordinary.

I like to start with the ordinary, and then nudge it, and then think, 'What happens next, what happens next?'

I named my album 'So Uncool' because it defies the ordinary: you're different from everyone else. It's like, being uncool makes you cool because you're different!

I do a film because at that particular moment, I want to make a film. It is my attempt at moving away from the ordinary.

You can make a saxophone into an electric organ; you can do everything with it.

But I've come to the point in my evolution on the instrument where I realize that I can't play the same stuff that just a guitar player or organ player would play - and I need to embrace that in a big way.