Douglass North Quotes

I believe that the constant possibility of failure or possibility of decision-making feeds your creativity.

It's just about pushing yourself to realms that are uncharted. I love to get to that place where I don't know what kind of music I'm doing, I don't know if it's any good, I don't know if it's anything. It's a big question mark. The idea is to have interesting results. That's my bottom line. Not just a creative fantasy world or something like that, but a mood too.

I never want to repeat the same thing. I always want it to be different from what I've done, and to be not quite sure whether or not I can pull it off, until I hopefully do.

I know that the way to be a really successful writer is to write the same kind of book over and over again. Find the kind of thing that people like and just write one of those over and over again. I don't do that. I just keep doing different things.

When you don't know the rules, you break them all. It's hard to take big risks when you know the history of an industry and what has worked and what didn't.

If I do enough different things in enough different ways, I may, eventually, do something right.

You never know exactly how new policies are going to work. That doesn't mean you shouldn't try them.

To truly live a creative life means that you will need to experiment in as many different fields as possible.

I want brave people. Fearless ones. A good actor just goes out and leaps off the edge and develops wings on his way down, hopefully. That's the kind of people I really enjoy working with. Playing safe isn't much fun. I like danger. It's controlled danger, always, and that's why I hope I don't lure too many good actors down into the pits with me, because I hope they maintain their own unique talents.

If you're not having doubt, you're not pushing the boundaries far enough.

My real bottom-line hypothesis is that nobody has a sweet clue what they’re doing. Therefore you better be trying stuff at an insanely rapid pace. You want to be screwing around with nearly everything. Relentless experimentation was probably important in the 1970s-now it’s do or die.

Consider everything an experiment.

Let's think beyond the normal stuff and have an environment where that sort of thinking is encouraged and rewarded and where it's okay to fail as well. Because when you try new things, you try this idea, that idea... well a large number of them are not gonna work, and that has to be okay. If every time somebody comes up with an idea it has to be successful, you're not gonna get people coming up with ideas.

Creative exploration [is] impossible, without (humble) acknowledgement of the unknown.

We cannot innovate without opening the door to havoc.

You hope that the ideas will come together. You just don't know. That's part of what I suppose is part of being brave and putting creative work out there.

Research is a way of taking calculated risks to bring about incalculable consequences.

There is no knowledge without risk taking.

You're more likely to drown in the sea of sameness than get eaten by a shark while navigating new waters.

I would say Colin Jost is Kanye West because he takes like the creative risk a lot of times, whereas I'm like, "Uh, I don't know..."

Perhaps our national ambition to standardize ourselves has behind it the notion that democracy means standardization. But standardization is the surest way to destroy the initiative, to denumb the creative impulse above all else essential to the vitality and growth of democratic ideals.

If you are going to do large-scale invention, you have to be willing to do three things: You must be willing to fail; you have to be willing to think long term; and you have to be willing to be misunderstood for long periods of time.

Creative Endeavors are by their nature uncertain.

If you are not successful, that means you're not making enough mistakes.

Really interesting things come because you don't know what the rules are, what you can and can't do.