Quotes: Avoid Crowds

From Hugh MacLeod's How To Be Creative:

11. Don't try to stand out from the crowd; avoid crowds altogether.

Your plan for getting your work out there has to be as original as the actual work, perhaps even more so. The work has to create a totally new market. There's no point trying to do the same thing as 250,000 other young hopefuls, waiting for a miracle. All existing business models are wrong. Find a new one.

Category: Quotes

Quotes: Creativity Is...

Creativity is inventing, experimenting, growing, taking risks, breaking rules, making mistakes, and having fun.

From Mary Lou Cook via Teo.eSuper.

Category: Quotes

Quotes: Sharpening The Axe

Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.

Abraham Lincoln as quoted in Achieve-IT!: Abe Lincoln’s Productivity Secret.

[via Lifehacker]

Category: Quotes

Quotes: Finding A Vision

Finding a vision takes you being brave enough to not do what everyone else is doing. Do what suits you and do what you are good at. Be inspired, but give your inspirations your own twist. And don't follow anyone else.

Jamiroquai singer Jay Kay in the November 2005 issue of Remix.

Category: Quotes

Quotes: Renzo Piano

This is an indirect quote in an interesting article on architect Renzo Piano:

The people who make the most noise often have the least to shout about.

[via Kottke]

Category: Quotes

Quotes: Ed Harris As Pollock

From the Ed Harris movie Pollock:

Lee Krasner watching Pollock paint: What's this? I see the head - the body. This isn't cubism, Jackson, because you're not really breaking down the figure into multiple views. You're just showing us one side. What is this? Free association? Automatism?

Pollock: I'm just painting, Lee.

Lee Krasner: But what are you doing, Jackson? Don't tell me you don't know what you're doing. Are you experimenting with surrealism? Is this a dream? Even if it's a dream, it's still what you see. It's life. You're not just randomly putting paint on the canvas. You're painting something. You can't abstract from nothing. You can only abstract from life - from nature.

Pollock: I am nature.

Category: Quotes

Quotes: I Know That Cat’s Solos

“Yo, son, I’ll tell you everything you wanna know about Herbie Hancock,” says Hip-Hop Nick, my swaggering Lebanese Phishhead-turned-jazzbo-turned-B-boy-producer neighbor from down the hall. “I know that cat’s solos like some folks know words,” he brags.

From issue 18 of Paste Magazine.

Category: Quotes

Quotes: I Be Talking Again

I got mind control over Deebo. When he say shut up - I be quiet. But when he leave, I be talking again.

Chris Tucker as Smokey in the 1995 movie Friday.

Category: Quotes

Quotes: I'm Just An Antenna

Keith Richards' thoughts on songwriting could be applied to painting or design.

I look for ambiguity when I'm writing because life is ambiguous. I have no idea what the audience makes of me. Sometimes I don't know whether I'm going under their heads or over their heads. Writing songs is a peculiar practice anyway. I never feel I write them, I'm just an antenna and the songs are already zooming through the room, and I hope to pick up something.

From Keith Richards in Raygun 22, Dec/Jan 1995.

Category: Quotes

Quotes: Tom Stoppard

Skill without imagination is craftsmanship and gives us many useful objects such as wickerwork picnic baskets. Imagination without skill gives us modern art.

From Tom Stoppard in Artist Descending a Staircase.

Category: Quotes

Quotes: On Intelligence

I don’t think I’m really all that intelligent, but I have a talent for amplifying my intelligence.

From R. D. G., 1975, in How to Write More Clearly, Think More Clearly, and Learn Complex Material More Easily.

Category: Quotes

Quotes: The Wild One

Girl: What're you rebelling against, Johnny?
Johnny: Whaddya got?

From Marlon Brando's The Wild One, 1953, via Punk: Attitude.

Category: Quotes

Quotes: Pirates of the Caribbean

Will Turner: This is either madness or brilliance.
Jack Sparrow: It's remarkable how often those two traits coincide.

From Pirates of the Caribbean, 2003.

Category: Quotes

Quotes: Arthur O'Shaughnessy

We are the music-makers,
And we are the dreamers of dreams,
Wandering by lone sea-breakers,
And sitting by desolate streams;
World-losers and world-forsakers,
On whom the pale moon gleams:
Yet we are the movers and shakers
Of the world for ever, it seems.

From poet Arthur O'Shaughnessy, 1844–1881 (Ode, 1-8).

[via Willy Wonka]

Category: Quotes

Quotes: Paul Klee

Color possesses me. I don't have to pursue it. It will possess me always, I know it. That is the meaning of this happy hour: Color and I are one. I am a painter.

From artist Paul Klee, 1879-1940.

Category: Quotes

Quotes: Matisse's Dream

What I dream of is an art of balance, of purity and serenity devoid of troubling or depressing subject matter - a soothing, calming influence on the mind, rather like a good armchair which provides relaxation from physical fatigue.

From Henri Matisse, 1869-1954, via the May issue of icon.

Category: Quotes

Quotes: Begin Anywhere

From Bruce Mau's Incomplete Manifesto:

John Cage tells us that not knowing where to begin is a common form of paralysis. His advice: begin anywhere.

Category: Quotes

Quotes: A Theory about Genius

Recognizing the common thinking strategies of creative geniuses and applying them will make you more creative in your work and personal life.

I enjoyed Michael Michalko's article A Theory about Genius outlining "descriptions of strategies that are common to the thinking styles of creative geniuses in science, art, and industry throughout history":

• Geniuses look at problems in many different ways
• Geniuses make their thought visible
• Geniuses produce
• Geniuses make novel combinations
• Geniuses force relationships
• Geniuses think in opposites
• Geniuses think metaphorically
• Geniuses prepare themselves for chance

[via the book Brain Tattoos (excerpt)]

Category: Quotes

Quotes: Talk About The Method

I've always had a certain resistance to trying to talk about the Method, not because I want to create some specious aura of mystery but because it's so unscientific. It's mining in the muck.

From Daniel Day-Lewis on acting in the April 2005 GQ - can be equally applicable to painting and some other creative endeavors.

Category: Quotes

Quotes: Pop Art

I am for an art that takes its forms from the lines of life itself, that twists and extends and accumulates and spits and drips and is heavy and coarse and blunt and sweet and stupid as life itself.

From artist Claes Oldenbourg.

Category: Quotes

Quotes: The Last Place You Look

Why are things always in the last place you look for them? Because you stop looking when you find them.

From a children's riddle quoted in chapter 2 of the great usability book Don't Make Me Think.

Category: Quotes

Quotes: Voltaire

Originality is nothing but judicious plagiarism.

From Voltaire, author and philosopher (1694 - 1778).

Category: Quotes

Quotes: Heraclitus

A wonderful harmony arises from joining together the
seemingly unconnected.

From Heraclitus, pre-Socratic Greek philosopher (544 - 483 BC).

Category: Quotes

Quotes: Frank Zappa

Without music to decorate it, time is just a bunch of boring production deadlines or dates by which bills must be paid.

From Frank Zappa.

Category: Quotes

Quotes: Scott Adams

Creativity is allowing oneself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep.

From Scott Adams in The Dilbert Principle.

Category: Quotes

Quotes: Squashed Philosophers

The Squashed Philosophers features condensed versions of great philosophers' works:

The books which defined the way The West thinks now
Condensed and abridged to keep the substance, the style and the quotes, but ditching all that irritating verbiage.

Category: Quotes

Quote: Clerks

Dante: But you hate people.
Randal: Yes, but I love gatherings. Isn't it ironic?

From Kevin Smith's first movie, Clerks (1994).

Category: Quotes

Quote: On Luck

Luck is the residue of design.

From Branch Rickey, a baseball executive in the Hall of Fame (1881 - 1965).

Category: Quotes

Quote: Think Creatively

Creativity can't defend itself against fear. If you're in a culture where people are fearful, they're not going to think creatively. Cultures based in fear - which many corporations are - kill creativity just by their nature.

From Michael Gold of Jazz Impact.

Category: Quotes

Quote: Creativity

Everyone is born creative; everyone is given a box of crayons in kindergarten. Then when you hit puberty they take the crayons away and replace them with books on algebra etc. Being suddenly hit years later with the creative bug is just a wee voice telling you, "I’d like my crayons back, please."

From tip 6 of How To Be Creative (PDF) by Hugh MacLeod.

Category: Quotes

Quote: Matrix Reloaded

Agent Thompson: You!
Agent Smith: Yes, me.
Agent Smith, turning Thompson
into another Smith: Me, me, me.
New Agent Smith Clone: Me too.

Category: Quotes

Quote: Heraclitus

Man is most nearly himself when he achieves the seriousness of a child at play.

From Heraclitus, pre-Socratic Greek philosopher, (544 - 483 BC).

Category: Quotes

Quote: Wilde

From Oscar Wilde, Irish dramatist, novelist, & poet (1854 - 1900 AD):

We're all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.

Category: Quotes