Robin Ince Quotes

I had been told from school onwards that the best definition of a human being was man the tool-maker - yet I had just watched a chimp tool-maker in action. I remember that day as vividly as if it was yesterday.

I believe that creativity is an important human experience and element in the same way as sleeping, eating, having sex.

I want to involve creativity more in technology and business. It is obvious that for us to be successful, a healthy relationship with creativity is needed.

Consider a cow. A cow doesn't have the problem-solving skill of a chimpanzee, which has discovered how to get termites out of the ground by putting a stick into a hole. Evolution has developed the brain's ability to solve puzzles, and at the same time has produced in our brain a pleasure of solving problems.

Technology makes possibilities. Design makes solutions. Art makes questions. Leadership makes actions.

They say an elephant never forgets. Well, you are not an elephant. Take notes, constantly. Save interesting thoughts, quotations, films, technologies…the medium doesn't matter, so long as it inspires you. When you're stumped, go to your notes like a wizard to his spellbook. Mash those thoughts together. Extend them in every direction until they meet.

The typewriter separated me from a deeper intimacy with poetry, and my hand brought me closer to that intimacy again.

Creativity occurs in an act of encounter and is to be understood with this encounter as its center.

Chimpanzees are incredibly intelligent. They can learn more than 400 signs of American Sign Language. They have memories for spatial distribution, like numbers on a TV screen, way better than ours. You come onto the emotions: happiness, sadness, fear, and despair - all the things for which I was accused of being anthropomorphic when I ascribed them to chimpanzees.

A computer is like a violin. You can imagine a novice trying first a phonograph and then a violin. The latter, he says, sounds terrible. That is the argument we have heard from our humanists and most of our computer scientists. Computer programs are good, they say, for particular purposes, but they aren’t flexible. Neither is a violin, or a typewriter, until you learn how to use it.

Intelligence is just a tool to be used toward a goal, and goals are not always chosen intelligently.

I don't use iMovie and don't use shitty little cameras to try to prove something or say something because that's a part of the process. We do it just because that's what we like to use.

What use is my mind? Granted that it enables me to hail a bus and to pay my fare. But once I am inside my studio, what use is my mind? I have my model, my pencil, my paints. My mind doesn't interest me.

If I thought that what I'm doing when I write is expressing myself, I'd junk the typewriter. Writing is a much more complicated activity that that.

It's always been most important for me to figure out "my space" rather than trying to check out what everyone else is up to, minute by minute. Technology is making it easier to connect to other people, but maybe harder to keep connected to yourself-- and that's essential for any artist, I think.

In the beginning, a monkey evolutioned gay marriage.

Creativity is the process that gives life to a new product.

If a pig could give his mind to anything, he would not be a pig.

Throw up into your typewriter every morning. Clean up every noon.

I really love printmaking. It’s like a mystery and you’re trying to figure out how to rein it in.

All the best ideas come out of the process; they come out of the work itself.

To me one of the amazing technologies of writing is the way it can listen in on thoughts. I don't feel that that's natural to other art forms in the same way.

Don't worry about mistakes. Making things out of mistakes, that's creativity.

I'm a barrel of monkeys, kid, though mostly I figure monkeys stuck in a barrel are just going to be pissed off.

You are right in demanding that an artist should take an intelligent attitude to his work, but you confuse two things: solving a problem and stating a problem correctly.