Lateral Thinking Quotes

I'll be more enthusiastic about encouraging thinking outside the box when there's evidence of any thinking going on inside it.

Think left and think right and think low and think high. Oh, the thinks you can think up if only you try!

Smart people are a dime a dozen. What matters is the ability to think different... to think out of the box.

I'm Irish. We think sideways

You have to think outside the box.

Stupid. Stupid. Foaly, we are both imbeciles. I don't expect lateral thinking from the LEP, but from you..." ... "What is it?" [Holly] asked, afraid of the answer, which must surely be terrible. "Yeah," agreed Foaly, who always had time to feel insulted. "Why am I an imbecile?

There can be no technique or formula for creativity.

Lateral thinking is concerned not with playing with the existing pieces but with seeking to change those very pieces. It is concerned with the perception part of thinking. This is where we organise the external world into the pieces we can then 'process'.

To generate creative ideas, it's important to start from an unusual place. But to explain those ideas, they have to be connected to something familiar.

Some people are aware of another sort of thinking which... leads to those simple ideas that are obvious only after they have been thought of... the term 'lateral thinking' has been coined to describe this orther sort of thinking; 'vertical thinking' is used to denote the conventional logical process.

Steve Martin said that philosophy is good for comedy because it screws up your thinking just enough, and I agree with that. Being forced to see life's metadata is good training for looking for interesting angles on a topic.

When people find out that I've written 208 novels, they ask, 'How did you think of all that?' Well, I answer, 'How do you not think of it?' I see a gum wrapper on the ground, and I think, 'Oh, a Russian spy probably dropped that.' I just think like that, and those thoughts go through my mind constantly.

Letting your mind play is the best way to solve problems.

Think off-center.

It is not always by plugging away at a difficulty and sticking to it that one overcomes it; often it is by working on the one next to it. Some things and some people have to be approached obliquely, at an angle.

I'm a peripheral visionary.

It's always good to take an orthogonal view of something. It develops ideas.

I have to think as Bugs Bunny, not of Bugs Bunny.

I wouldn't know how to think inside the box because I don't even know where it is. I wouldn't know how to do it any other way.

As regards obstacles, the shortest distance between two points can be a curve.

You can't teach someone to be imaginative.

I'm good at thinking outside the box, so much that you realise it's not a box to begin with.

With vertical thinking one may look for different approaches until one finds a promising one. With lateral thinking one goes on generating as many approaches as one can even after one has found a promising one. With vertical thinking one is trying to select the best approach but with lateral thinking one is generating different approaches for the sake of generating them.

My parents are wonderful, and I'm really lucky - but my mom has always been almost exclusively a right-brained person.

The vertical thinker says: 'I know what I am looking for.' The lateral thinker says: 'I am looking but I won't know what I am looking for until I have found it.'