Scott Adams Quotes

You do stuff that gets a reaction and you think 'that's a winner' and then it never sees the light of day. But the thing with improvisation is that 90% of what you come up with won't be used and for good reason. But you keep going for the occasional gem that you might come up with. You do a scene and a lot of the time. We wouldn't cut. So, you come up with something that might be funny and then you go, 'alright, what else'? So, you kind of throw stuff against the wall and see what happens. But you've got to be prepared to make a fool of yourself.

I mean, I love L.A. - I love living here. But I wish that we could make things without the need to hit a home run every single time. It's a unique thing to Hollywood that if you don't do that every time, then you're considered a failure. But it's like, 'Well, are you making movies to be successful? Or are you making movies to learn something?'

We shouldn't be afraid to fail- if we are not failing we are not pushing. 80% of the stuff in the studio is not going to work. If something is not good enough, stop doing it.

You have to have an unlimited imagination, an unlimited restraint on your inhibition when you're working. You have to even dare to fail, even in a scene, whatever it is.

Give the composer time to experiment, time to try out ideas. Also, the time to fail. When the composer has very little time, the temptation is to reach for stock ideas - ideas they know will work and have worked in the past.

My job is to put as many ideas out there as possible every day. Some of them will get traction, some won't - some of them shouldn't.

You can't have good ideas unless you're willing to generate a lot of bad ones.

To make something really great and different and interesting means taking risks and following these ideas in your head.

At times failure is very necessary for the artist. It reminds him that failure is not the ultimate disaster. And this reminder liberates him from the mean fussing of perfectionism.

Write it. Shoot it. Publish it. Crochet it, sauté it, whatever. MAKE.

I tell the actors that the biggest gift they can give me is to fail. And that the second gift they can give me is to surprise me.

You can't buy something which does not exist. In a way, let's make things exist and then judge later. Don't cancel the process of creativity too early; let it flow.

Photography is still a very new medium and everything must be tried and dare.

Creative experimentation propels our culture forward. That our stories of innovation tend to glorify the breakthroughs and edit out all the experimental mistakes doesn't mean that mistakes play a trivial role. As any artist or scientist knows, without some protected, even sacred space for mistakes, innovation would cease.

If I find something I like, I'll chase it and see what comes out the other side. Once a song gets momentum and gets away from you, that's a good sign.

If I have a thousand ideas and only one turns out to be good, I am satisfied.

Punishing honest mistakes stifles creativity. I want people moving and shaking the earth and they're going to make mistakes.

Musical accidents are a gold mine. The thing about accidental discoveries is they won't be made unless you put yourself in a position to make that discovery. To do that means hundreds of hours, days and weeks where you do things and don't discover anything.

I always wanted to be really experimental.

I love to get to that place where I don't know what kind of music I'm doing; I don't know if it's any good. I don't know if it's anything. It's a big question mark. The idea is to have interesting results. That's my bottom line.

The thing I have to do as a writer, and that God permits me to do, is that I have to be willing to fail.

There's a way of playing safe, there's a way of using tricks and there's the way I like to play which is dangerously where you're going to take a chance on making mistakes in order to create something you haven't created before.

An essential aspect of creativity is not being afraid to fail

When we did 'Breaking the Waves,' he had a sign on the wall that said, 'Make mistakes.'

There's a silly notion that failure's not an option at NASA. Failure is an option here. If things are not failing, you are not innovating enough.