Quotes by Journalists - Page 164

Risk is the unique path to success.
Adria J. Cimino
In fact, most of us see perseverance as a distinctly uncreative approach, the sort of strategy that people with mediocre ideas are forced to rely on.
Jonah Lehrer
The only way to maximize group creativity—to make the whole more than the sum of its parts—is to encourage a candid discussion of mistakes. In part, this is because the acceptance of error reduces cost. When you believe your flaws will be quickly corrected by the group, you're less worried about perfecting your contribution, which leads to a more candid conversation. We can only get it right when we talk about what we got wrong.
Jonah Lehrer
There is nothing in the world which an artist cannot recreate into something poetic, ennobling. And why do we read these things? They are not facts, they do not improve our business skills, our techniques in manufacturing goods, the management of a home. That is what most of you will be doing anyway. We read these because they teach us about people, we can see ourselves in them, in their problems. And by seeing ourselves in them, we clarify ourselves, we explain ourselves to ourselves, so we can live with ourselves…
F. Sionil Jose'
...Why are corporations so fleeting?...Instead of imitating the freewheeling city, these businesses minimize the very interactions that lead to new ideas. They erect walls and establish hierarchies. They keep people from relaxing and having insights. They stifle conversations, discourage dissent, and suffocate social networks. Rather than maximizing employee creativity they become obsessed with minor efficiencies.
Jonah Lehrer
The vocational approach at NOCCA (New Orleans Center for the Creative Arts) helps build grit in students. It teaches them how to be single-minded in pursuit of a goal, to sacrifice for the sake of a passion. The teachers demand hard work from their kids because they know, from personal experience, that creative success requires nothing less.
Jonah Lehrer
At least I understood that writing was this: an impulse to share with other people a feeling or truth that I myself had. Not to preach to them, but to give it to them if they cared to hear it.
Brenda Ueland
It doesn't matter if people are playing jazz or writing poetry -- if they want to be successful, they need to learn how to persist and persevere, how to keep on working until the work is done. Woody Allen famously declared that "eighty percent of success is showing up." NOCCA (New Orleans Center for the Creative Arts) teaches kids how to show up again and again.
Jonah Lehrer
The great ages did not perhaps produce much more talent than ours,' [T.S.] Eliot wrote. 'But less talent was wasted.
Jonah Lehrer
And so we keep on thinking, because the next thought might be the answer.
Jonah Lehrer
...the imagination is unleashed by constraints. You break out of the box by stepping into shackles.
Jonah Lehrer
...if you always move in certainty, your writing will be flat - creativity is a rugged terrain...
John Geddes
Flow is something the reader experiences, not the writer.
Verlyn Klinkenborg
Creation's probably overrated. After all, God made the world in only six days and rested on the seventh.
Ernest Hemingway
To create today is to create dangerously. Any publication is an act, and that act exposes one to the passions of an age that forgives nothing.
Albert Camus
It is better for the intellectual not to talk all the time. To begin with, it would exhaust him, and, above all, it would keep him from thinking. He must create if he can, first and foremost, especially if his creation does not side-step the problems of his time.
Albert Camus
to paraphrase science writer John D. Barrow … we know they are impossible and yet we can imagine them anyway. Our brains, it turns out, are not prisoners of the world we live in; we can fly free! We can, any time we like, create the impossible.
Robert Krulwich
Despite being a denizen of the digital world, or maybe because he knew all too well its isolating potential, Jobs was a strong believer in face to face meetings. " There's a temptation in our networked age to think that ideas can be developed by email and iChat,"he said."Thats crazy, Creativity comes from spontaneous meetings, from random discussions. You run into someone, you ask what they're doing, you say ' Wow, and soon your cooking up all sorts of ideas." So he had the Pixar building planned to promote encounters and unplanned collaborations. " If a building doesn't encourage that, you'll lose a lot of innovation and the magic that's sparked by serendipity,"he said.
Walter Isaacson
Artistry, perhaps, is at its core being able to control change in interesting ways.
Jeff Ryan
Up until relatively recently, creating original characters from scratch wasn't a major part of an author's job description. When Virgil wrote The Aeneid, he didn't invent Aeneas; Aeneas was a minor character in Homer's Odyssey whose unauthorized further adventures Virgil decided to chronicle. Shakespeare didn't invent Hamlet and King Lear; he plucked them from historical and literary sources. Writers weren't the originators of the stories they told; they were just the temporary curators of them. Real creation was something the gods did.All that has changed. Today the way we think of creativity is dominated by Romantic notions of individual genius and originality, and late-capitalist concepts of intellectual property, under which artists are businesspeople whose creations are the commodities they have for sale.
Lev Grossman
Everyone wants a definition of creativity that makes what they do into something special and what everyone else does into nothing special. But the fact is, we're all creative. We come up with weird and interesting ideas all the time. The biggest difference between 'creators' isn't their imagination - it's how hard they work. Ideas are easy. Doing stuff is hard.
Cory Doctorow
So many important New York musicians were gay, one wit dubbed the American Composers League the Homintern.
Charles Kaiser
It is not commercial success but originality and proof of autonomy which are admired.
Angela Phillips
after life has broken you open, perhaps you may create art
John Geddes
He had entered another imaginative world, one connected to the beginning of his life as a writer, to the Napoleonic world that had been a lifelong metaphor for the power of art, for the empire of his own creation He began to dictate notes for a new novel, "fragments of the book he imagines himself to be writing." As if he were now writing a novel of which his own altered consciousness was the dramatic center, he dictated a vision of himself as Napoleon and his own family as the Imperial Bonapartes....William and Alice he grasped with his regent hand, addressing his 'dear and most esteemed brother and sister.' To them, to whom he had granted countries, he now gave the responsibility of supervising the detailed plans he had created for 'the decoration of certain apartments, here of the Louvre and Tuileries, which you will find addressed in detail to artists and workment who take them in hand.' He was himself the 'imperial e
Fred Kaplan
you cannot teach art—you cannot make a soul
John Geddes
If there’s a single idea I emphasize when people ask about writing, it’s that there’s no right way to produce a book. But I do think that whatever you do, you should do regularly, whether it’s waking up at midnight and drinking vodka or waking up at dawn and drinking tea, whether it’s sitting in a monkish study or writing on the back of a flatbed truck. The analogy I like is children’s literature: in a lot of children’s books, there’s a huge institutional structure (Hogwarts, for example) whose presiding safety allows the children’s imagination to run free. The more consistent your habits are – and this ties into having your tools nailed down – the more secure your brain will be to run free and create.
Charles Finch
Daemons had minds of their own, which could never be harnessed, even by those who sheltered them.
Curtis Bill Pepper
Every creative force has an equal power to destroy.
Curtis Bill Pepper
Creatives fail and the really good ones fail often.
Steven Kotler
All change begins with someone having a thought.
Paul Morley
True creativity is inherently destructive, and truly creative individuals always, without exception, seek to destroy the mediums they work within.
Douglas Haddow
Creativity could be described as letting go of certainties.
Gail Sheehy
Don't be dismayed by the opinions of editors, or critics. They are only the traffic cops of the arts.
Gene Fowler
I’ve learned that the creative life may or may not be the apex of human civilization, but either way it’s not what I thought it was. It doesn’t make you special and sparkly. You don’t have to walk alone. You can work in an office — I’ve worked in offices for the past 15 years and written five novels while doing it. The creative life is forgiving: You can betray it all you want, again and again, and no matter how many times you do, it will always take you back.
Lev Grossman
Haven't I told you scores of times, that you're always beginners, and the greatest satisfaction was not in being at the top, but in getting there, in the enjoyment you get out of scaling the heights? That's something you don't understand, and can't understand until you've gone through it yourself. You're still at the state of unlimited illusions, when a good, strong pair of legs makes the hardest road look short, and you've such a mighty appetite for glory that the tiniest crumb of success tastes delightfully sweet. You're prepared for a feast, you're going to satisfy your ambition at last, you feel it's within reach and you don't care if you give the skin off your back to get it! And then, the heights are scaled, the summits reached, and you've got to stay there. That's when the torture begins; you've drunk your excitement to the dregs and found it all too short and even rather bitter, and you wonder whether it was really worth the struggle. From that point there is no more unknown to explore, no new sensations to experience. Pride has had its brief portion of celebrity; you know that your best has been given and you're surprised it hasn't brought a keener sense of satisfaction. From that moment the horizon starts to empty of all hopes that once attracted you towards it. There's nothing to look forward to but death. But in spite of that you cling on, you don't want to feel you're played out, you persist in trying to produce something, like old men persist in trying to make love, with painful, humiliating results. ... If only we could have the courage to hang ourselves in front of our last masterpiece!
Émile Zola
Every creative journey begins with a problem. It starts with a feeling of frustration, the dull ache of not being able to find the answer. We have worked hard, but we've hit the wall. We have no idea what to do next.
Jonah Lehrer
The thing is, work has simply swamped my whole existence. Slowly but surely it's robbed me of my mother, my wife, and everything that meant anything to me. It's like a germ planted in the skull that devours the brain, spreads to the trunk and the limbs, and destroys the entire body in time. No sooner am I out of bed in the morning than work clamps down on me and pins me to my desk before I've even had a breath of fresh air. It follows me to lunch and I find myself chewing over sentences as I'm chewing my food. It goes with me when I go out, eats out of my plate at dinner and shares my pillow in bed at night. It's so extremely merciless that once the process of creation is started, it's impossible for me to stop it, and it goes on growing and working even when I'm asleep. ... Outside that, nothing, nobody exists.
Émile Zola
I can’t overstate how little I knew about myself at 22, or how little I’d thought about what I was doing. When I graduated from college I genuinely believed that the creative life was the apex of human existence, and that to work at an ordinary office job was a betrayal of that life, and I had to pursue that life at all costs. Management consulting, law school, med school, those were fine for other people — I didn’t judge! — but I was an artist. I was super special. I was sparkly. I would walk another path.And I would walk it alone. That was another thing I knew about being an artist: You didn’t need other people. Other people were a distraction. My little chrysalis of genius was going to seat one and one only.
Lev Grossman
You are responsible for everything you post and everything you post will be a reflection of you. [Social Media]
Germany Kent
Orwell's short and intense life has for years borne witness to some of those verities of which we were already aware. Parties and churches and states cannot be honest, but individuals can. Real books cannot be written by machines or committees. The truth is not always easy to discern, but a lie can and must be called by its right name. And the imagination, like certain wild animals, as Orwell himself once put it, will not breed in captivity. Actually, that last metaphor is beautiful but inaccurate. Even in the most dire conditions, there is a human will to resist coercion. We must believe that even now in North Korea, there are ideas alive inside human brains that were not put there by any authority.
Christopher Hitchens
Sir Ken Robinson’s 2008 talk on educational reform—entitled “Do Schools Kill Creativity?”—has now been viewed more than 4 million times. In it Robinson cites the fact that children’s scores on standard tests of creativity decline as they grow older and advance through the educational system. He concludes that children start out as curious, creative individuals but are made duller by factory-style schools that spend too much time teaching children academic facts and not enough helping them express themselves. Sir Ken clearly cares greatly about the well-being of children, and he is a superb storyteller, but his arguments about creativity, though beguilingly made, are almost entirely baseless.
Ian Leslie
He saw the world more vividly than other people, and reacted to what he saw with laughter, horror, indignation, and sometimes sobs.
Claire Tomalin
Berg paid his way with stories.
Nicholas Dawidoff
After all those neurochemicals are drained out, it takes a while for them to replenish so on the back end of flow state...I can barely string sentences together. I become stupid.
Steven Kotler
Creativity is always a leap of faith. Writers sit down in front of empty pages. Painters stare before blank easels. Thespians rehearse looking toward empty stages. Creativity is experimental by nature.
Brian D'Ambrosio
Necessity and desperation birth resourcefulness.
Ron Suskind
Literature offered a safe circumscribed outlet for sadness.
Richard Brookhiser
Creativity is, in many respects, a response.
Matthew Syed
The best way to describe your total creative capacity is to say that for all practical purposes it is infinite.
George Leonard
He knew that the best way to create value in the twenty-first century was to connect creativity with technology, so he built a company where leaps of the imagination were combined with remarkable feats of engineering.
Walter Isaacson
Nothing kills creativity faster than a wall.
Eric Weiner
Einstein's secretary once said that if Einstein were born among the polar bears, he would still be Einstein. But unless polar bears were well versed in theoretical physics, that is not true. Einstein would not be Einstein. Which is not to take anything away from Einstein, or the polar bears, but simply to point out that he was part of a creative ecology, and trying to isolate him from it is not only silly but futile.
Eric Weiner
It's a silly argument, and unnecessary. Creativity doesn't happen "in here" or "out there" but in the spaces in between. Creativity is a relationship, one that unfolds at the intersection of person and place.
Eric Weiner
All genuinely creative ideas are initially met with rejection, since they necessarily threaten the status quo. An enthusiastic reception for a new idea is a sure sign that it is not original.
Eric Weiner
Money chases good ideas
Jonah Lehrer
We see them most when we are o nnthe outside looking in
Jonah Lehrer
It begs for a gospel of perseverance through inevitable failure... There is no antidote to the chaos of creative markets. Only the brute doggedness to endure it.
Derek Thompson
Becoming me was the greatest creative project of my life.
Lev Grossman
The secret to doing good research is always to be a little underemployed. You waste years by not being able to waste hours
Michael Lewis