Quotes About Creativity

I remember him telling me that engineering was the highest level of importance you could reach in the world," Steve Wozniak later recalled. "It takes society to a new level.

The reason Apple can create products like the iPad is that we've always tried to be at the intersection of technology and liberal arts

The people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do. —Apple's "Think Different" commercial, 1997

The tale of their teamwork is important because we don't often focus on how central that skill is to innovation.

Jobs was a strong-willed, elitist artist who didn't want his creations mutated inauspiciously by unworthy programmers. To him it would be as if someone off the street added some brush strokes to a Picasso painting or changed the lyrics to a Dylan song.

Seek knowledge for its own sake. Not all knowledge needs to be useful. Sometimes it should be pursued for pure pleasure. Leonardo did not need to know how heart valves work to paint the Mona Lisa, nor did he need to figure out how fossils got to the top of mountains to produce Virgin of the Rocks. By allowing himself to be driven by pure curiosity, he got to explore more horizons and see more connections than anyone else of his era.

Leonardo at twenty-nine was more easily distracted by the future than he was focused on the present.

He had an imagination so excitable that it flirted with the edges of fantasy, which is also something we can try to preserve in ourselves and indulge in our children.

Now kids get a MacBook and regard it as an appliance. They treat it like a refrigerator and expect it to be filled with good things, but they don't know how it works. They don't fully understand what I knew, and my parents knew, which was what you could do with a computer was limited only by your imagination."8

Wozniak would be the gentle wizard coming up with a neat invention that he would have been happy just to give away, and Jobs would figure out how to make it user-friendly, put it together in a package, market it, and make a few bucks.

how the ability to make connections across disciplines—arts and sciences, humanities and technology—is a key to innovation, imagination, and genius.

to let Jobs go, but Bushnell worked out a solution. "The smell and behavior wasn't an issue with

In all of his products, technology would be married to great design, elegance, human touches and even romance.

First and foremost is that creativity is a collaborative process. Innovation comes from teams more often than from the lightbulb moments of lone geniuses. This was true of every era of creative ferment. The Scientific Revolution, the Enlightenment, and the Industrial Revolution all had their institutions for collaborative work and their networks for sharing ideas.

It was yet another example of Jobs consciously positioning himself at the intersection of the arts and technology. In all of his products, technology would be married to great design, elegance, human touches, and even romance.

He kept asking Kay and others for an assessment of "trends" that foretold what the future might hold for the company. During one maddening session, Kay, whose thoughts often seemed tailored to go directly from his tongue to wikiquotes, shot back a line that was to become PARC's creed: "The best way to predict the future is to invent it."60

The job of art is to chase ugliness away.

The only problem with Microsoft is they just have no taste, they have absolutely no taste," he said. "I don't mean that in a small way. I mean that in a big way, in the sense that they don't think of original ideas and they don't bring much culture into their product.

Innovation occurs when ripe seeds fall on fertile ground.

He told us to go back to the roots of the original 1984 Macintosh, an all-in-one consumer appliance," recalled Schiller. "That meant design and engineering had to work together.

People don't invent things on the Internet. They simply expand on an idea that already exists.

Once again, the greatest innovation would come not from the people who created the breakthroughs but from the people who applied them usefully.

For help with the speech, he called the brilliant scriptwriter Aaron Sorkin (A Few Good Men, The West Wing). Jobs sent him some thoughts. "That was in February, and I heard nothing, so I ping him again in April, and he says, 'Oh, yeah,' and I send him a few more thoughts," Jobs recounted. "I finally get him on the phone, and he keeps saying 'Yeah,' but finally it's the beginning of June, and he never sent me anything.

After the applause, he used the quotations book to make a more subtle point, about his reality distortion field. The quote he chose was from Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass. After Alice laments that no matter how hard she tries she can't believe impossible things, the White Queen retorts, Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast. Especially from the front rows, there was a roar of knowing laughter.