Stuart Woods Quotes

The way to get good ideas is to get lots of ideas and throw the bad ones away.

To me, ideas are like annoying salespeople that only go away once I've built them.

Nothing, believe me, nothing is more satisfying to me personally than getting a great idea and then beatin' it to death.

If you want to have good ideas you must have many ideas. Most of them will be wrong, and what you have to learn is which ones to throw away.

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.

I wish somebody had given me the news that ideas don't just fall on your head like fairy dust. You have to treat that like a job. You have to spend hours each day, where you're just like, 'This is the part of the day when I'm looking for an idea.'

I think that everything is part of creativity - the more you create, the more you have ideas, and the more you meet people.

The last thing one discovers in composing a work is what to put first.

It's not enough to tell people to be creative; they need to know how, and what to create.

I do throw out a lot of ideas, and I forget completely about them.

Well, what I try to do is throw as much mud on the wall as I possibly can and just see what sticks, what shines as quirky or more interesting that the others, and I try to cling onto that one, somehow join a link from there to there.

Creativity is a spark. It can be excruciating when we're rubbing two rocks together and getting nothing. And it can be intensely satisfying when the flame catches and a new idea sweeps around the world.

I guess some people are brilliant enough to be brilliant on their own and never doubt anything and come up with fabulous things. But I think it's good to get into arguments with people and have them say, 'That sucks' or 'You're crazy' or 'That's cheesy' or 'What do you think of this?'

I almost literally wake up in the morning starting to think of my next idea. It's almost always driven by what's in the news. The hard part, really, is getting from knowing what I want to say to figuring out how to say it in an image. I'm still not entirely sure how to explain how that happens... Suddenly, something just works.

You can't really think about more than one movie at a time. You're thinking about it consciously, and the subconscious is working too, and if you cram too much into your head, you don't get any ideas in the shower.

My joking answer to this question is that I leave a bowl of milk out on the back porch every night for the Idea Fairy. In the morning, the milk is gone and there's a brand-new shiny idea by the bowl.

The best way to have a good idea is to have a lot of ideas.

Typically my ideas come to me in the most inane ways possible. I had the initial idea for 'Quantum Conundrum' while I was walking down the street to get breakfast. People are like, 'Whoa, what's your inspiration, is it something amazing?' No, I was just really hungry.

A new idea is like carbonated liquid in a bottle. You just sort of shake it until the cork pops, then you write and write.

Think of the imagination as a giant stone from which we carve out new ideas. As we chip away, our new ideas become more polished and refined. But if you start by editing your imagination, you start with a tiny stone.

I don't have to come up with the best idea. It is my job to make sure that it is always the best idea that wins.

One rule of invention: before you can invent it, you have to imagine it.

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.

Great ideas are very much 'of the moment,' and endlessly mulling them over just takes up too much of your brain space and might block your next great idea. Act on it, give it away, or move on.

When trying to innovate, most people stop after 10-15 possibilities, failing to recognize that their first ideas are usually the most obvious ones.