Quotes About Innovation

Conventional lives are the perfect refuge if you are a terrible artist.

I wanted to tell them that, in Kabul, we snapped a tree branch and used it as a credit card. Hassan and I would take the wooden stick to the bread maker. He'd carve notches on our stick with his knife, one notch for each loaf of naan he'd pull for us from the tandoor's roaring flames. At the end of the month, my father paid him for the number of notches on the stick. That was it. No questions. No ID.

about clichés. Avoid them like the plague.

Imagine a sentence as a hall with a series of doors. Each door is a possible way to use what you've already written to generate new material.

Robert Frost said, "No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader.

Why did she [Madame Curie] seek to tame this mystery, which in the hands of others turned a multitude to ashes? Her work exploded with the violence of a thousand suns, but I must tell her that it was not her fault, the way they twisted her creation, tampered with her dreams. I will tell her. They said she was inhuman, heartless, but it is not so. She is here now. Weeping, she awaits me, She is carrying balm for our hands. [p, 56]

Screened bottom boards were used by beekeepers more than 150 years ago for improved ventilation. Beekeepers replaced them with solid bottom boards in the winter, and over time the expense of having two pieces of equipment fell into disfavor, and the screens went away.)

We are the primitives of an unknown civilization

Why have a word for something they'd never seen?

Kim Stanley Robinson

I'm told finance doesn't require very complicated math. One guy told me that if you just designed a clean data display, people were amazed. So it's more just advanced programming

Kim Stanley Robinson

We just may have started a volcano!" "Is that good?" Coyote laughed wildly. "I don't know! But no one's ever done it before, so it has that at least to recommend it.

Corporation, n. An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility

But that was back in the twentieth century, in the dark ages

Cinnamon, raw sienna, Persian orange, sunburn, camel, rust brown, Sahara, chrome orange…they began to laugh. Nothing was quite right. "We'll call it Martian orange," Maya decided.

Art should be used to change things.

Kim Stanley Robinson

Kim Stanley Robinson

So. Our little pearl of warmth, our spinning orrery of lives, our island, our beloved solar system, our hearth and home, tight and burnished in the warmth of the sun—and then—these starships we are making out of Nix. We will send them to the stars, they will be like dandelion seeds, floating away on a breeze. Very beautiful. We will never see them again.

When you had the world and your body as canvases, why deal in squares of wallpaper?

we're not here to, you know, reproduce Canada, for God's sake!

This method is the only way that will work. But it didn't work! It cut out on us! Yes, but this was just the start. If at first you don't succeed— You'll never get funded again.

Kim Stanley Robinson