Theodore Levitt Quotes

If something that needs to be done that we don't feel confronting, we do it through the manager.

There is a notion that creative people are absent-minded, reckless, heedless of social customs and obligations. It is, hopefully, true for they are in another world altogether.

When I'm looking for an idea, I'll do anything--clean the closet, mow the lawn, work in the garden.

Only when creative people take ownership of cosmic discovery will society accept science as the cultural activity that it is.

In the fetus, or a really young child, all the different brain areas are connected to each other, diffusely. And as the brain develops, the excess connections are turned off, so you get very specialized areas. So most people have really specialized talents. What happens in creative people is this pooling doesn't take place.

Places that succeed in attracting and retaining creative class people prosper; those that fail don't.

I think maybe the most important thing that I or anybody at my company and any of my colleagues can do is establish a trusting, productive, collaborative relationship with creative people.

Creative people do not belong in the university because the process is antithetical to the analytical process so necessary for proper scholarship.

Many wonderful, creative people have won Oscars, so if you win one, you're in their company.

Thanks to the critics and thanks to the Emmys, we got all sorts of great reviews and notices and awards, at the start. Part of it is that it's great fortune to have something to live up to, but as creative people, we all have to just put that aside and go forward, make the best product we can, have as joyous of an experience as we can, and really remember that the spirit of this was to surprise the fans with something that they didn't see coming.

When we do not do the one thing we ought to do, we have no time for anything else - we are the busiest people in the world.

The easiest thing to do on earth is not write…But this is life on earth, you can't have everything.

The average man won't really do a day's work unless he is caught and cannot get out of it. There is plenty of work to do if people would do it.

I don't mean that creative people are somehow finer, or more sensitive, and thus have finer, more sensitive nervous breakdowns - you can save that horseshit for the Sylvia Plath worshipers. It's just that creative people have creative breakdowns.

When you're running a company, you have employees - lots of them - that can interrupt your schedule. You have customers that can interrupt your schedule. You have a certain obligation to wave the flag because people expect to get out and wave the flag. The number of ways that others can command your time is high. At this stage, I get to pick and choose a little more. Not that there aren't some things that have to be done, but I get a little more control over my time.

It's the task that's never started that's more tiresome.

A lot of people just capitulate and say, "Well, that's just the way things are." I think that can be deadly for creative people.

Most people put off till tomorrow that which they should have done yesterday.

We accomplish all that we do through delegation - either to time or to other people.

To help [people] understand that what you shortcut today, cannot be made up tomorrow. So it's like, I'm not going to do anything today, and I'm going to do the wrong thing today and somehow tomorrow it will get a lot better."

If you want to get something done, give it to a busy man.

The work that we do is so tricky because it rests on our shoulders, but it's also collaborative and part of it is trusting the people that you're working with.

I think that all writers feel alienated. ... I know that I do. ... I still feel, as I think most creative people do, absolutely isolated.

The most regretful people on earth are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave to it neither power nor time.

There must be times when everybody writes when they feel they're evading writing.