Quotes About Creativity

My experience tells me that API users are really creative. Sometimes the API user's horizon is farther than that of the API designer. If there is a way to misuse something, users are likely to do so.

Unless you're living on the street and surviving on a diet of discarded turkey drumsticks, there's no point in being gloomy. We've spent too long trying to cheer ourselves up by spending money on brightly coloured things we don't really need. We've stopped using our imaginations.

There's the famous thing that the A&ampR man from the record company is supposed to do: He's supposed to come into the studio and listen to the songs you've been recording and then say, 'Guys, I don't hear any singles.' And then everybody falls into a terrible depression because you have to write one.

One day as we were doing our bookwork, a teacher suddenly asked us to help him remove all the desks and chairs from the center of the classroom. Then he sat us all down in a circle, brought out his guitar, and sang songs. We recognized the lyrics—the poems and stories we ourselves had written! After that I wrote more, searching dictionaries for new words to express myself. Every day we walked out of class believing that what we did mattered.

Music has a lot in com­mon with math­e­mat­ics. But in music, two and two need not make four: they add up to what­ever you wish.

Bringing something into physical form can be a way not only of expressing but also integrating what's inside.

I think it's important for artists to work together. It's great for fans to see, like, Ludacris came out to our show in Atlanta and kinda made a surprise appearance there, it shows a mutual respect for what each other does.

If you say, 'I'm going to cut this song because I know the teenagers are going to love it ' well, then you're going to alienate everybody else. When I cut my record, I'm just going to cut the things that I like, and whoever likes it, likes it. That's too much work to try to figure out the demographic. That's too much like a business.

Richey currently smokes 50 cigarettes a day, having started two weeks ago. "Whenever I do something, I like to do it a lot," he explains back at the hotel. "When I was 13, I did a Shakespeare project that was 859 pages long. Everyone else just did six. I just had fuck all else to do but sit in and write...

He justifies the cigarette burns as, "my way of not screaming or shouting when things fuck up. It's just discipline, and something to do. We never call each other cunts and wankers in this band. We just walk away." "What I usually do," pitches in Nicky, "is put all my clothes in the sink and wash 'em. That's the difference between him and me!

Limited resources force you to make do with what you've got. There's no room for waste. And that forces you to be creative.

WE ALL HAVE ideas. Ideas are immortal. They last forever. What doesn't last forever is inspiration. Inspiration is like fresh fruit or milk: It has an expiration date.

Meaningful work, creative work, thoughtful work, important work—this type of effort takes stretches of uninterrupted time to get into the zone. But in the modern office such long stretches just can't be found. Instead, it's just one interruption after another.

you'd be amazed how much quality collective thought can be captured using two simple tools: a voice connection and a shared screen.

When you build a product or service, you make the call on hundreds of tiny decisions each day. If you're solving someone else's problem, you're constantly stabbing in the dark. When you solve your own problem, the light comes on. You know exactly what the right answer is.

When someone copies you, they are copying a moment in time. They don't know the thinking that went into getting you to that moment in time, and they won't know the thinking that'll help you have a million more moments in time. They're stuck with what you left behind.

You can only do great work if you have adequate quality time to do it.

Todos tenemos ideas. Las ideas son inmortales. Duran siempre. Lo que no dura siempre es la inspiración. Es como la fruta fresca o la leche: tiene fecha de caducidad. Si quieres hacer algo, tienes que hacerlo ahora.

When we start designing something, we sketch out ideas with a big, thick Sharpie marker, instead of a ballpoint pen. Why? Pen points are too fine. They're too high-resolution. They encourage you to worry about things that you shouldn't worry about yet, like perfecting the shading or whether to use a dotted or dashed line. You end up focusing on things that should still be out of focus.

The ability to be alone with your thoughts is, in fact, one of the key advantages of working remotely. When you work on your own, far away from the buzzing swarm at headquarters, you can settle into your own productive zone. You can actually get work done—the same work that you couldn't get done at work! Yes

The ability to be alone with your thoughts is, in fact, one of the key advantages of working remotely.

These half-baked, right-in-the-middle-of-something-else new ideas lead to half-finished, abandoned projects that litter the landscape and zap morale.

Given that, you're only going to frustrate yourself and everyone else if you summon the brain trust too frequently for those Kodak moments. Because either it means giving up on the last great idea (the one that still requires follow-up) or it means further stuffing the backlog of great ideas. A stuffed backlog is a stale backlog.

Accept that better ideas aren't necessarily better if they arrive after the train has left the station. If they're so good, they can catch the next one.