Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Quotes

A good idea will keep you awake during the morning, but a great idea will keep you awake during the night.

The great discoveries are usually obvious.

Exhilaration is that feeling you get just after a great idea hits you, and just before you realize what's wrong with it.

I don't know how to explain it, but when you're working on something constantly, and you're digging in deep, things kind of fall in, and you grab them, and you're like, 'That one!' and 'That thing!' and it starts to build something right.

I once wrote a lecture for Manchester University called « Moments of Discovery » in which I said that there are two moments that are important. There's the moment when you know you can find out the answer and that's the period you are sleepless before you know what it is. When you've got it and know what it is, then you can rest easy.

An idea, to be suggestive, must come to the individual with the force of revelation.

The more original a discovery, the more obvious it seems afterwards.

I think a badly crafted, great idea for a new film with a ton of spelling mistakes is just 100 times better than a well-crafted stale script.

I think in order to keep America great, we have to keep America creative.

What you end up seeing when you look at history is that people who have been good at pushing the boundaries of possibility, and exploring those frontiers of good ideas and innovations, have rarely done it in moments of great inspiration. They don't just have a brilliant breakthrough idea out of nowhere and leap ahead of everyone else.

A single idea, if it is right, saves us the labor of an infinity of experiences.

Boredom always precedes a period of great creativity.

Ideas sometimes come from nowhere, and sometimes they take lots of thinking.

Sometimes ideas feel like they were already there, and that you're just discovering them.

You ask me if I keep a notebook to record my great ideas. I've only ever had one.

Every great inspiration is but an experiment - though every experiment we know, is not a great inspiration.

If you have a great day at work and you've been hit with all these great ideas and there's a lot of excitement on your team, your mind doesn't turn off. For years I've kept a pad of paper and pen by me at night, because things just occur to you.

In the quiet moments, the discoveries are made.

For years that may mean imitation. Then, one day, it is like a door opening, and a new thought comes in. Why not try this instead. Suddenly he is doing something original, almost in spite of himself.

Nobody is bored when he is trying to make something that is beautiful, or to discover something that is true.

Despite a few really bad days we had quite a lot of fun making Low, especially when all the radical ideas were making sense and things were starting to click.

Curiosity about life in all of its aspects, I think, is still the secret of great creative people.

Every now and then, I strike something that just goes click, you know, in my head. As Gertrude Stein used to say, it rings the bell, and I feel, this is great.

The element of truth in the concept of genius is to be sought in the object, in what is open, not confined by repetition.

I have had my results for a long time: but I do not yet know how I am to arrive at them.