Michel de Montaigne Quotes

Few ideas work on the first try. Iteration is key to innovation.

I always treat each take as a rehearsal for the next take. That way you can find stuff and keep adding and playing until they tell me to stop.

Nothing is invented and perfected at the same time.

I try something new every night. It's an hour show; if it works I maybe try it a few more times and then move that off and try something new. It's a great workshop for me.

Give the composer time to experiment, time to try out ideas. Also, the time to fail. When the composer has very little time, the temptation is to reach for stock ideas - ideas they know will work and have worked in the past.

In trying to make something new, half the undertaking lies in discovering whether it can be done. Once it has been established that it can, duplication is inevitable.

Creative experimentation propels our culture forward. That our stories of innovation tend to glorify the breakthroughs and edit out all the experimental mistakes doesn't mean that mistakes play a trivial role. As any artist or scientist knows, without some protected, even sacred space for mistakes, innovation would cease.

You can't do sketches enough. Sketch everything and keep your curiosity fresh.

Life is pretty simple: You do some stuff. Most fails. Some works. You do more of what works. If it works big, others quickly copy it. Then you do something else. The trick is the doing something else.

I'm still experimenting.

We don't always know what we're doing. We often just get excited, put something down, and say, 'Oh, neat'.

With any new medium, the full power is only unearthed with experimentation.

When you're building a show from the ground up, there are no answers or wrong move, because there's no bible.

Failing is part of my process. A new bit never works the first time. I figure I have to bomb 7 times to make it good. So I tweak it.

The hardest thing in the world to do is to take something everyone already knows and make it a little better.

What good is an idea if it remains an idea? Try. Experiment. Iterate. Fail. Try again. Change the world.

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

None of us understand what we're doing, but we do beautiful things anyway.

Remember that, sooner or later, before it ever reaches perfection, you will have to let it go and move on and start to write the next thing. Perfection is like chasing the horizon. Keep moving.

I'm always tweaking, always trying to make it better, constantly moving the levers and dials.

I'm always experimenting and trying different things. That's what keeps it fun and encourages growth.

But there's no substitute for getting smarter faster. And the way you get smarter is to screw around vigorously. Try stuff. See what works. See what fails miserably. Learn. Rinse. Repeat.

There’s never a wrong idea. You just keep throwing stuff out and inevitably there are elements of different things that inspire a character or environment.

The first time you do something, it's science. The second time, it's engineering. The third time, it's just being a technician. I'm a scientist. Once I do something, I want to do something else.