William Pollard Quotes

I think there's something about studying a book which will kill it if you're not careful.

If you start to analyze what you do, it can paralyze you.

I'm the kind of person who can paralyze myself very easily by over-thinking decisions.

Perfectionism spells paralysis.

I think people place limitations on each other and on ourselves. There is a great fear of expressing ourselves, of making creativity happen.

If you never want to be criticized, for goodness sake don't do anything new.

[T]he habit of scientific analysis ... exhausts the material offered to it.

If fear causes you to retreat from your dreams, you will never give the world anything new.

I don't think you have time to waste not writing because you are afraid you won't be good at it.

The trouble with innovation is that truly innovative ideas often look like bad ideas at the time.

To be an innovator, you can't be worried about making mistakes.

We can all do better. America is an entrepreneurial society. We had entrepreneurs who started our country. And they want us to think in fresh, new, different ways all of the time.

It is the curse of a certain order of mind, that it can never rest satisfied with the consciousness of its ability to do a thing.Still less is it content with doing it. It must both know and show how it was done.

Those who make no mistakes are making the biggest mistakes of all - they are attempting nothing new.

Innovation and creativity are the juiciest parts of running a business.

Not making a decision is the worst thing you can do. So long as you feel you made the right decision based on the information you had at that time, there's no need to fret about it. If it fails, you'll know what to do next time.

When I tried to grasp at either what I love or what I hate, I destroyed the very ability of being able to really penetrate the essence of either. By trying to understand it, I would just crush it.

Every intellectual revolution which has ever stirred humanity into greatness has been a passionate protest against inert ideas. Then, alas, with pathetic ignorance of human psychology, it has proceeded by some educational scheme to bind humanity afresh with inert ideas of its own fashioning.

Or is it that I think too much?

New and stirring things are belittled because if they are not belittled the humiliating question arises 'Why then are you not taking part in them?

Almost every significant breakthrough is the result of a courageous break with traditional ways of thinking.

Originality is also very important to a writer. And all of the writers I've mentioned, of course, are original, but it's important to me that every book that I do be really a completely fresh and new look at the world. And of course, that makes it frightening to start a new book because you can't really depend upon what you've done with previous books.

I don't need to feel 100% safe, but I have to feel like there's room for me to go a little bit insane if I'm going to have good ideas. Because a good idea is a new idea and if you start going around like, "I have this new idea!" most people are gonna be like, "I've never heard that before, that sounds fishy."

I think it is the general rule that the originator of a new idea is not the most suitable person to develop it, because his fears of something going wrong are really too strong... At age 69.