“Catch things that have been falling for a thousand years.”
Wayne White
more infosource: “Studio Visits: Wayne White,” Arrested Motion blog, January 20, 2014.
category: art, creativity, hand lettering, idea, inspiration, painting
medium: Painting
via: Austin Kleon“Ideas, in a sense, are overrated. Of course, you need good ones, but at this point in our supersaturated culture, precious few are so novel that nobody else has ever thought of them before. It’s really about where you take the idea, and how committed you are to solving the endless problems that come up in the execution.”
Hugo Lindgren
more infosource: “Be Wrong as Fast as You Can,” New York Times Magazine, January 4, 2013.
category: idea, originality, perseverance, problem solving
medium: Magazine article
via: Austin Kleon“If the idea doesn’t gel after a certain amount of struggle you have to give it up. I read once about the concepts of the lateral idea and the vertical idea. If you dig a hole and it’s in the wrong place, digging it deeper isn’t going to help. The lateral idea is when you skip over and dig someplace else.”
Seymour Chwast
more infosource: The Left-Handed Designer, ed. by Steven Heller (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1985), 8.
medium: Interview
“I always think that everybody is getting their ideas in the shower and the people who are writing them down, keeping the soggy notes, are the writers.”
Lorrie Moore
more infosource: “Scott Spencer,” interviewed by Lorrie Moore, BOMB magazine, Issue 67, Spring 1999.
category: creative process, idea, shower, writer
medium: Interview
“Didn’t somebody ask Leonard Cohen where he got his ideas, and he said that if he knew, he’d go there more often? What I’m trying to do is find a way to get into that place. And I can do it on my own, but it’s been really interesting being around other people, trying to show them about it, because it really is just showing somebody where the path is down to the curvy river. And people think I’m a genie at first, and then they realize, no, I just knew where the trailhead was.”
Lynda Barry
more infosource: “Lynda Barry in search of the image world,” The Boston Phoenix, interview by S.I. Rosenbaum, April 13, 2011.
category: creativity, idea, Leonard Cohen, teacher
medium: Interview
“Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen.”
John Steinbeck
more infosource: “Interview with a Best-Selling Author: John Steinbeck,” by Robert van Gelder in April 1947 issue of Cosmopolitan magazine, 18, 123–25.
medium: magazine interview
“The problem with hoarding [ideas] is you end up living off your reserves. Eventually you’ll become stale. If you give away everything you have, you are left with nothing. This forces you to look, to be aware, to replenish. Ideas are open knowledge. Don’t claim ownership. They’re not your ideas anyway, they’re someone else’s. They are out there floating by on the ether. You just have to put yourself in a frame of mind to pick them up.”
Paul Arden
more infosource: It’s Not How Good You Are, It’s How Good You Want to Be (New York: Phaidon, 2003), 57.
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category: creativity, hoarding, idea, ownership
medium: self-help (advertising)
“His mind makes immense detours. Then he gets lost. And then I am able to bring him back, not because I know any more than he does, or because I am more whole, but because I have a sense of direction in the world of ideas.”
Anaïs Nin
more infosource: The Diary of Anaïs Nin [Vol. 1 1931–1934] (New York: The Swallow Press, 1966), 158.
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category: Henry Miller, idea, lost, sense of direction
medium: diary
notes: Nin is describing Henry Miller
idea