Creative Efficiency Quotes

I learned a lot from working with and watching Knxwledge, seeing how he produces non-stop. He doesn't dwell too long on stuff. He's very simple, using only about two or three elements. I like that in production. Sometimes it doesn't take more than three drums, a melody, the vocal, looping a sample or whatever, just as minimal as possible.

Everybody is different. Some writers can write reams of great books and then J. D. Salinger wrote just a few. Beethoven wrote nine symphonies. They were all phenomenal. Mozart wrote some 40 symphonies, and they were all phenomenal. That doesn't mean Beethoven was a lesser writer, it's just some guys are capable of more productivity, some guys take more time.

The Stones were always exemplary of one of the best of all rock qualities: tightness. They have always been economical, the opposite of ornamental. Having a very clear idea of what they wanted to say they could go into a studio and make it all up on a three minute cut.

The time it would take me to write a screenplay it would take me the time to make two films. I would rather make the movies, and I'm a better moviemaker than I would be writer.

Invention consists in avoiding the constructing of useless contraptions and in constructing the useful combinations which are in infinite minority.

A writer wastes nothing.

Prose cannot compete with the economy of poetry, the ability to have a full artistic experience in a short period of time.

Most of the time, songs that I write end up being finished in 30 minutes or less.

Reading music has opened up me up so much. I've been experimenting for so long and trying to make sense of things just from my ears. It takes forever. Now I can get where I want much quicker.

You have to shelve a lot of your inspiration. There's only so much you can do with one record.

If I had to spend equal time doing paintings, and equal time going to galleries and doing art business, and equal time making music, and equal time going to record companies, or to the publicist or to the lawyer, forget it. It would take four times as long to do all that stuff. Unless I had a patron. That's why Leonardo da Vinci was successful. He had the Medicis, right?

Stopping to think is fine for characters, but not for their creators. They have to work.

I've found the 90-10 rule to be pretty true: 90 percent of what I come up with and write down is kinda 'eh,' and then somehow, someway, 10 percent of it happens to work out really great in my act.

The Google model of targeted advertising is appealing because it claims to cut down on waste. We need to ask how that efficiency can be brought to creative process.

I tend to write and record things quite quickly. You can tamper with things for years, and it's artistic laziness sometimes.

I usually make records very quickly. I usually go in and record them and mix them, and I'm done within a couple of weeks.

You shouldn't need 60 full minutes to create a portrait that an audience doesn't forget. You should be able to make an impression that's lasting and resonant with one scene.

I've tried writing on a computer thinking it would make me more efficient, but if you're writing crummy stuff, being efficient is no help.

I use the city because it saves time, I don't have to do a lot of research on the setting.

In Bollywood, on an average, movies are made in six months or a year, but Puri completed 'Loafer' in two months.

It don't take me no three days to record no album.

Like a great poet, Nature knows how to produce the greatest effects with the most limited means.

My process is surprisingly straightforward. I find myself with little to do over a stretch of time and I say, "I should write children's books today." Then I sit down and write a children's book, and if it takes more than, realistically, three hours, I feel like I've done something wrong.

Our whole dream for our home was for it to be an artist's haven. So there are paint supplies; there's a piano with a microphone and a recorder right there to capture things right in the second. There's editing equipment. There are cameras. I think the only thing in our house that people would be surprised by is the efficiency.

I write four or five a books a year. That means that I usually have one on the go. I am fortunate in being able to write quickly - 1000 words an hour.