Clay Shirky Quotes

I never know what I'm going to put on the canvas. The canvas paints itself. I'm just the middleman.

I often think about the many remarkable things that my personal computer can do which I never ask it to do. I probably use a small fraction of its capabilities. I often wonder if the same dynamic occurs with our capacity for creativity.

Fantasy, abandoned by reason, produces impossible monsters; united with it, she is the mother of the arts and the origin of marvels.

If it were up to me, I'd rather create things that last long-term, but my thrill comes from reflecting what's going on now.

Artistically I am still a child with a whole life ahead of me to discover and create. I want something, but I won't know what it is until I succeed in doing it.

Great ideas have no attachment to either money or class.

Video games are engineered now, but the step I am trying to take, no one can engineer.

Is it not in the most absolute simplicity that real genius plies its pinions the most wonderfully?

Creativity is bound up in our ability to find new ways around old problems.

I love people who just started making movies - first-timers, second-timers. They take chances.

You do not know, and the readers cannot tell you, what they might like until they have it. It is one of those things that particularly if you want to be the next wave, well the next wave is not already on the bestseller lists. The next wave is in somebody's head.

Everything that is really great and inspiring is created by the individual who can labor in freedom.

To "go to extremes" is ever symptomatic of genius and greatness.

Genius is always impatient of its harness; its wild blood makes it hard to train.

The inner artist is not the voice of reason. The inner artist can have wild and impossible ideas... The inner artist is not the voice of comfort.

Genius is a grace. The true man of genius acts by movement or by impulsion.

The tendency of experts is to fiddle around with their expertise rather than trying to find new solutions.

There are no boundaries for what can be fabric.

I love mishmash and the chaos of art forms.

I don't think you need a certificate to truly legitimize you or authenticate you as a designer. I think real innovation and creativity can come from everywhere.

There are no such men today. We have created a mechanism that makes it practically impossible for a real genius to appear. In my own field the biochemist Fritz Lipmann or the much maligned Linus Pauling were very talented people. But generally, geniuses everywhere seem to have died out by 1914. Today, most are mediocrities blown up by the winds of the time.

The imagination, give it the least license, dives deeper and soars higher than Nature goes.

You can't have creativity unless you leave behind the bounded, the fixed, all the rules

Creativity requires the freedom to consider 'unthinkable' alternatives, to doubt the worth of cherished practices. Every organization, every society is under the spell of assumptions so familiar that they are never questioned, least of all by those most intimately involved.

We are not to tell nature what she’s gotta be... She's always got better imagination than we have.