Quotes About Creativity

use as few chips as possible, both as a personal challenge and because he did not want to take advantage of his colleague's largesse. Much of the work was done in the garage of a friend just around the corner, Bill Fernandez, who was still at Homestead High. To lubricate their efforts, they drank large amounts of Cragmont cream soda, riding their bikes to the Sunnyvale

Money is not the greatest of motivators," Torvalds said. "Folks do their best work when they are driven by passion.

The reason Apple resonates with people is that there's a deep current of humanity in our innovation.

What is imagination?" she asked in an 1841 essay. "It is the Combining faculty. It brings together things, facts, ideas, conceptions in new, original, endless, ever-varying combinations. . . . It is that which penetrates into the unseen worlds around us, the worlds of Science."25

At the end of the presentation someone asked whether he thought they should do some market research to see what customers wanted. "No," he replied, "because customers don't know what they want until we've shown them.

Invention implies contributing something to the flow of history and affecting how an innovation developed.

Hacer lo imposible es bastante divertido, declaró en una ocasión Walt Disney.

The Analytical Engine weaves algebraical patterns just as the Jacquard loom weaves flowers and leaves.

Picasso Good authors copy, great artists steal-Picassco

People would confront a problem by creating a presentation. I wanted them to engage, to hash things out at the table, rather than show a bunch of slides. People who know what they're talking about don't need PowerPoint.

Vision without execution is hallucination. But I also came to believe that his ability to blur the line between reality and fantasy, just like his sfumato techniques for blurring the lines of a painting, was a key to his creativity. Skill without imagination is barren. Leonardo knew how to marry observation and imagination, which made him history's consummate innovator.

Instead he had a trait that was just as useful in promoting collaborative creativity and managing a team: he was decisive. More important, his decisiveness was based not on emotion or personal favoritism but rather on a rational and precise analysis of options.

I wanted to buy it because I was really into computer graphics," Jobs recalled. "I realized they were way ahead of others in combining art and technology, which is what I've always been interested in.

Steve Jobs, Al Alcorn

Paul Jobs was then working at Spectra-Physics, a company in nearby Santa Clara that made lasers for electronics and medical products. As a machinist, he crafted the prototypes of products that the engineers were devising.

I think you still have to think differently to buy an Apple computer," he said. "The people who buy them do think different. They are the creative spirits in this world, and they're out to change the world. We make tools for those kinds of people.

Half-formed ideas, they float around. They come from different places, and the mind has got this wonderful way of somehow just shoveling them around until one day they fit. They may fit not so well, and then we go for a bike ride or something, and it's better."12

It's also a narrative of how they collaborated and why their ability to work as teams made them even more creative.

Florence flourished in the fifteenth century because it was comfortable with such people. Above all, Leonardo's relentless curiosity and experimentation should remind us of the importance of instilling, in both ourselves and our children, not just received knowledge but a willingness to question it—to be imaginative and, like talented misfits and rebels in any era, to think different.

NeXT, 1988: Freed from the constraints at Apple, he indulged his own best and worst instincts.

The astronomer Johannes Kepler declared that "nature loves simplicity and unity." So did Steve Jobs.

It should not be hard for you to look at stains on walls, or the ashes of a fire, or the clouds, or mud, and if you consider them well you will find marvelous new ideas, because the mind is stimulated to new inventions by obscure things.9

Some people say, "Give the customers what they want." But that's not my approach. Our job is to figure out what they're going to want before they do. I think Henry Ford once said, "If I'd asked customers what they wanted, they would have told me, 'A faster horse!'" People don't know what they want until you show it to them. That's why I never rely on market research. Our task is to read things that are not yet on the page.

truths, and he wanted to examine everything himself." Dudman allowed Jobs to audit classes and stay with friends in the dorms even after he stopped paying tuition. "The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn't interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting," he said. Among them was a calligraphy class that appealed to him