Quotes About Inspiration

Being a musician, there aren't that many ways for me to consciously use a more strategy, math-based part of my brain.

We allow people to be creative. We set a direction, we set the vision, we set the strategy, but within that framework, we allow our people to be as creative as they want to be.

Castro has been a teacher for me. A master. Not on ideology but on strategy.

There's no strategy involved in my career decisions. I do whatever roles make my heart beat faster.

As the leader, you're empowering talent. Once you've given the direction, it's a joy to see it put into action, to see people on every level of the company carrying out the strategy.

For me, music is a byproduct of this process - the human process - and the fact that I've managed to eke out a career with it is a happy accident more than any strategy.

I just write what I think is funny, or interesting, and hopefully everything else will take care of itself. There's no strategy to anything.

Sometimes it might be the junior-most player in the team who may come up with a strategy which we hadn't even thought of and we need to bring that to the table.

The stratosphere is my church.

I was raised on Elvis Presley and Buddy Holly and discovered the Stray Cats when I was 11 or 12 years old.

My first guitar was a Gretsch 6120, and I just loved listening to artists like Elvis, Chuck Berry and Stray Cats.

Directors are the fulcrum of the movie. They guide us well, not merely rein actors in. Whenever we stray, they bring us back on track.

If I can hear the music then no, I don't hit a wrong note. But if I can't hear the music because the audience is screaming or the sound system is bad, then I'm subject to stray.

I've always had an idealistic streak about storytelling in that I believe we owe more to audiences than repeatedly bludgeoning them over the head while stealing their lunch money. We owe them inspiration. That's why I'm more interested now in creating new heroes than hooking up jumper cables to old ones.

When I went to work with Garinger, they were good kids and a very good team. But they had a nine-game losing streak, and you can see that they were getting down and depressed and not feeling rewards for their efforts. But when I came in there, I didn't need to teach them much about X's and O's.

What can I say? I was there at the right place and with the right people. My theatre background helped a lot in shaping my comic streak.

No stream rises higher than its source. What ever man might build could never express or reflect more than he was. He could record neither more nor less than he had learned of life when the buildings were built.

I was working on a heat pump that used water as a working fluid, and I made some jet pumps for it. I accidentally shot a stream of water across a bathroom where I was doing the experiment and thought to myself, 'this would make a great gun.'

Probably when I was about 16 or 17 I started writing. I wouldn't call it poetry, even though I've referred to it as poetry a couple times. But I don't think that's right. It was more scribblings and stream of consciousness.

Writing is a very lonely occupation. To write you need to concentrate, to concentrate you need to lock yourself away. No distractions; you want your stream of thought uninterrupted.

I fantasised about F. Scott Fitzgerald's 'The Great Gatsby' - I loved it, and then I read everything J. D. Salinger had to offer. Then I was turned on to Kerouac, and his spontaneous prose, his stream of consciousness way of writing. I admired him so much, and I romanticised so much about the '40s and '50s.

It was a really strange way that I came into music. Once I gave voice to it, the pit of emotions that I guess I knew was inside of me for a long time, the stream never really stopped.

When I was growing up, my dad would always be playing Motown around the house. He loved Stevie Wonder and the Supremes and got me into Dionne Warwick. It was the best music I'd ever heard. It was just that extremely deep, human, thought-out stream of ideas. You can always hear something new when you listen to that music.

I basically just write stream of consciousness to a certain extent. I let the song kind of go where it wants to go.