Terry Teachout Quotes

I like to present something that the people haven't seen or haven't heard before. Otherwise they might as well just stay home and play the record.

I'm always constantly trying to find stuff that's different. It's a way to keep me on my toes and keep me interested and keep me excited about work.

The wonderful thing about theater is that anything, no matter how tendentious, no matter how stupid it sounds at first glance, can be made to work if it is charged with freshness and originality. You can have an entirely political Shakespeare production and I'll be sitting on the edge of my seat as long as it's surprising, as long as it's not just the standard, "out of the box" pseudo-transgressive production that we just see too much of nowadays.

I think anything you do that's different, that doesn't take the typical approach, invites differing opinions.

Enterprise is first creativity. You need creativity to see what's out there and shape it to your advantage. You need creativity to look at the world a little differently. You need creativity to take a different approach, to be different.

I always want to try to bring something fresh to every book. It's getting harder instead of easier. I feel like I work harder with each book. But I don't want it to show on the pages, that's for sure.

I think that it was a great advantage to go into photography not knowing much about it. Not thinking. I think one of the problems with many photographers today is that they never see for themselves, but just like everybody else.

... the genius never makes anything new, but always something that is just different, and the average talents provide him the possibility within which his genius condenses into achievements.

As an artist, I have been a risk-taker. And I've done a lot of different things. I don't make it easy for people. Identification is difficult. One doesn't recognize my art right away.

Innovation comes spontaneously. I don't know if I've done anything new. If I have, it's just because I had begun to feel for some time that I couldn't stand certain films, certain modes, certain ways of telling a story, certain tricks of plot development, all of it predictable and useless.

I just know that sameness, repetition, and conceptualizing are the acting craft's adversaries, and it seems more intelligent to start off within a framework where those things are, to some degree, taken out of your hands.

I like the fact that I like to think out-of-the-box. Thinking out-of-the-box goes along with dressing out-of-the-box and living out-of-the-box. If you want to come up with a really original design idea and you want to capture a whole new design direction, perhaps the best way to arrive at that is not by acting and thinking and doing like everybody else. That's all.

I think that genius comes not just from having great mental processing power. It comes from being able to, as Steve Jobs' ad said, think different.

Follow your genius closely enough, and it will not fail to show you a fresh prospect every hour.

You just want to find a story that grabs you and that you've never seen before, but somehow you can't imagine it not existing. It's like a good book. What makes a good book is hard to say. I don't know. I just look for something that grabs me. I don't have a way of looking for a project, and I don't know many people that do. It's just year to year, and what's going around and what's there.

I never want to repeat the same thing. I always want it to be different from what I've done, and to be not quite sure whether or not I can pull it off, until I hopefully do.

I don't think in art there is ever a precedent; each moment is a new one and terrifying and threatening and bursting with hope.

I'm going in a really weird I-don't-know-where direction, but I prefer anything [different] from how standardized filmmaking has become.

You know, I hate to borrow Apple's tag, but think different. Really. From the very beginning. I didn't know what the fast-food rules were. I got my training at the Culinary Institute Of America, and then I opened up a fast food place according to fine dining rules.

If there's any plan or scheme on my part, it's subconscious. Whatever I do tends to be very different from the thing I did last. You're terrified of boring either yourself or anyone else. It's always attractive if it feels like something that you haven't done before. I generally tend to be better, I think, when I'm terrified out of my wits.

It's good to be unexpected with it.

I never really put pressure on myself to make things seem new and spontaneous, mostly because I think everything is kind of derivative at this point. I enjoy the old-fashioned idea of like, His Girl Friday and Bringing Up Baby, those old movies. Those relationships are kind of where I've gotten inspiration for this character and this relationship. But I think what makes it new is just the words coming out of my mouth personally, and my take on it based on my own personal life experience is hopefully going to add something a little different, and add some flavor to it.

You say your image is new, but it looks well tested.

Invention is a flower, innovation is a weed.

One does not succeed by sticking to convention. When your opponent can easily anticipate every move you make, your strategy deteriorates and becomes commoditized.