Unplanned Discovery Quotes

Half of art is accident, but there is no accident without free experiment.

You need messiness and magic, serendipity and insanity. Creativity comes from time off, and time out.

A discovery is generally an unforeseen relation not included in theory.

Sometimes serendipity is just intention unmasked.

I doubt that Fleming could have obtained a grant for the discovery of penicillin on that basis [a requirement for highly detailed research plans] because he could not have said, 'I propose to have an accident in a culture so that it will be spoiled by a mould falling on it, and I propose to recognize the possibility of extracting an antibiotic from this mould.'

We owe most of our great inventions and most of the achievements of genius to idleness either enforced or voluntary.

I'm constantly being surprised and finding unplanned things - because the writing is a process of experiencing things on the ground with the characters.

You can not plan to make a discovery. You do not plan innovation.

The thing that I like about magazines, paper magazines, and papers in any kind of tangible format is the surprise factor of turning the page and not necessarily knowing what you're going to see. You're not looking for something. You're just experiencing something.

Sometimes you find yourself digging around for something useful, and you don't necessarily know what it is until you find it. Sometimes it's a word from a book that you read every day.

I don't like to see things on purpose. I like them to soak in. A friend . . . asked me to go to the top of the Empire State Building once, and I told him that he shouldn't treat New York as a sight-it's feeling, an emotional experience. And the same with every place else.

Maybe you're going to a concert thinking you're not going to hear anything but music. But you may walk away from there with an answer to a problem that you're carrying around with you that you didn't think you were going to hear about.

She told me later that she had made a kind of note of me in her mind, as, scanning the shelf for a particular book, one will sometimes have one's attention caught by another, take it down, glance at the title page and saying "I must read that, too, when I've the time," replace it and continue the search.