Quotes About Creativity

The Skrull Beatles discuss their future.) So when this is all over, are we still gonna be the Skrull Beatles then? I quite fancy being the Skrull Monkees for a bit. The dialogue's easier. As long as I get to be Peter Tork.

As long as it doesn't require special shoes, human sacrifice, or extra funding, you can do almost anything, as long as you let me know about it.

A picture tells a thousand words. But you get a thousand pictures from someone's voice.

The whirligig featured a drummer, a trumpet player, a clarinetist, and a man with a trombone. It was a leap beyond the spouting whale, with more figures, a six-bladed propeller, and a much more complex system of rods and pivots that made the instruments dip and rise as if the musicians were marching.

The red-jacketed band stirred to life. The first musician raised his trumpet. The trombone dipped. The drumstick rose. Lea lowered her clarinet. It had been Brent's idea not to have their insturments rise and fall in unison. The staggered motion gave it a more exciting rhythm.

Oulipo does not "explain" poetry, Ouilpo tries to find constraints for new kinds of poems. Oulipo is not into theory, it is a place of creation.

On one university campus there is a fifty-foot-tall pair of leaning tubes, ten feet in diameter, painted various shades of red and orange, and apparently struggling with each other. The maker has named it The Covenant. Students wisely call it Dueling Tampons.

It is only when you open your veins and bleed onto the page a little that you establish contact with your reader. If you do not believe in the characters or the story you are doing at that moment with all your mind, strength, and will, if you don't feel joy and excitement while writing it, then you're wasting good white paper, even if it sells, because there are other ways in which a writer can bring in the rent money besides writing bad or phony stories.

When Bauhaus designers adopted Sullivan's form follows function, what they meant was, form should follow function. And if function is hard enough, form is forced to follow it, because there is no effort to spare for error. Wild animals are beautiful because they have hard lives.

Always produce.

You can't distinguish your group by doing things that are rational and believing things that are true. If you want to set yourself apart from other people you have to do things that are arbitrary and believe things that are false.

Those in authority tend to be annoyed by hackers' general attitude of disobedience. But that disobedience is a byproduct of the qualities that make them good programmers.

In a big company, you can do what all the other big companies are doing. But a startup can't do what all the other startups do.

The way to create something beautiful is often to make subtle tweaks to something that already exists, or to combine existing ideas in a slightly new way. This kind of work is hard to convey in a research paper.

Hackers are unruly. That is the essence of hacking. And it is also the essence of Americanness. It is no accident that Silicon Valley is in America, and not France, or Germany, or England, or Japan. In those countries, people color inside the lines.

Trying to think of startup ideas doesn't merely yield few good ideas; it yields bad ideas that sound plausible enough to fool you into working on them.

A painting is never finished. You just stop working on it." This idea will be familiar to anyone who has worked on software.

Good design looks easy. Like great athletes, great designers make it look easy. Mostly this is an illusion.

Unknowing imitation is almost a recipe for bad design. If you don't know where your ideas are coming from, you're probably imitating an imitator.

The people most likely to grasp that wealth can be created are the ones who are good at making things, the craftsmen. Their hand-made objects become store-bought ones. But with the rise of industrialization there are fewer and fewer craftsmen. One of the biggest remaining groups is computer programmers.

It takes confidence to throw work away. You have to be able to think, there's more where that came from.

Great work tends to grow out of ideas that others have overlooked, and no idea is so overlooked as one that's unthinkable. Natural

It's hard to do a really good job on anything you don't think about in the shower

In hacking, like painting, work comes in cycles. Sometimes you get excited about a new project and you want to work sixteen hours a day on it. Other times nothing seems interesting.