Ethan Coen Quotes

I go around the room and ask people, 'What do you think?'

At Pixar, good ideas may be cut from a film, but they are never forgotten.

When it's a sharing and improvisational meeting, where you're riffing off other people's ideas, that actually can be productive.

At its core, 90 percent of my job is still sitting down in a room full of people, and breaking stories... and that requires virtually no technology.

There is one crucial rule that must be followed in all creative meetings. Never speak first. At least at the start, your job is to shut up.

I'm not the only one in the studio a lot of times, so I have my boys in there and they'll tell me and give me their suggestions and what they think.

I do a lot of brainstorming with my editors.

My office-hour reading is fairly ad hoc: I generally read whatever seems relevant to what I'm editing, writing, or thinking about writing.

Being able to chuck ideas around and bounce ideas off each other with anyone I'm working with is just something I love to do, that's how most of these ideas are formed.

When you're writing on someone else's show, you don't have to think as hard about nailing the perfect tone because you're kind of just like, 'Here's 20 ideas I thought of, and they can just pick the closest.'

Imagination is a funny thing - we sometimes need to see something before we can truly picture it.

I have an active imagination.

If you just stay with it and take it scene by scene, episode by episode, all of the questions that I have, as an actor, tend to answer themselves.

The No. 1 thing you have that costs nothing is your imagination: role play.

I really love being a part of the creative process. I love having an opinion that gets heard, and then it's all up for discussion.

There is no point having team meetings where no one speaks because you don't learn anything.

Two people making a beat is really like one person making a beat. But you have another person's brain. So what might sound good to you, they could flip it a different way. It's really a collaborative effort, really.

I think of myself as more additive than initially creative; I don't come up with the stories.

I have got a good imagination.

Every day the Daniels [Kwan and Scheinert] would come up with some amazing solution and [make it easy] to put yourself in their hands. There's something really lovely about knowing you're working with directors who know exactly what they want and exactly what they're looking for, and they're not going to move on until they have it. That, as an actor, frees you up a lot because you can [try different approaches] and they'll only use what's appropriate.

Having everyone get exposed to brainstorming, prototyping, thinking about a problem, that's a best practice. One of the things I love seeing is how genius people are. You'll be thinking about some area that needs improving, and then someone just comes in and gives you that little bit of energy. Free online education doesn't solve everything, but you open the window and you build on each other.

You have to think outside the box.

The best way to get people to think outside the box is not to create the box in the first place.

The imagination is how things get done. You have to cultivate creativity.

It isn't enough to think outside the box. Thinking is passive. Get used to acting outside the box.