James C. Collins Quotes

I'm not a tabula rasa type. In some ways, the more constraints I have, the work is more interesting to me.

Be regular and orderly in your life, that you may be violent and original in your work.

Ideas are easy. It's the execution of ideas that really separates the sheep from the goats.

No matter what you do, if you're trying to create something new, your environment has a massive impact on you.

If you don't execute your ideas, they die.

I had a history for starting something and maybe getting halfway done. Then I'd see the same thing I was doing on the bestseller list! My ideas were right, but I hadn't done them fast enough.

If I have a thousand ideas and only one turns out to be good, I am satisfied.

One reason I don't suffer Writer's Block is that I don't wait on the muse, I summon it at need.

Being around some of the bright lights of the technology world and having them expect great things helps you sit down and do it seriously.

I don't think that scheduling is uncreative. I think that structure is required for creativity.

Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work.

There is a certain combination of anarchy and discipline in the way I work.

Innovation is a discipline not a lottery... It comes from the combination of two elements within my control: hard work and openmindedness.

I usually take a walk after breakfast, write for three hours, have lunch and read in the afternoon. Demons don’t like fresh air - they prefer it if you stay in bed with cold feet; for a person who is as chaotic as me, who struggles to be in control, it is an absolute necessity to follow these rules and routines. If I let myself go, nothing will get done.

Discipline should amplify creativity rather than stifle it.

The great challenge is how to marry creativity with discipline so that discipline amplifies creativity without destroying it.

I'm a full-time believer in writing habits...You may be able to do without them if you have genius but most of us only have talent and this is simply something that has to be assisted all the time by physical and mental habits or it dries up and blows awayOf course you have to make your habits in this conform to what you can do. I write only about two hours every day because that's all the energy I have, but I don't let anything interfere with those two hours, at the same time and the same place.

You don't get into the mood to create – it's discipline.

To be creative, first I need to be really organized. If my apartment's messy I need to clean it. It's like before you start doing your homework or studying for a test, you have to have a clean room.

The routine is as much a part of the creative process as the lightening bold of inspiration, maybe more. And this routine is available to everyone.

I think that 60 percent of inspiration is organization.

If I waited to be in the mood to write, I'd barely have a chapbook of material to my name. Who would ever be in the mood to write? Do marathon runners get in the mood to run? Do teachers wake up with the urge to lecture? I don't know, but I doubt it. My guess is that it's the very act that is generative. The doing of the thing that makes possible the desire for it.

Discipline gives you the freedom to be creative.

You can't get to genius on a platform of excuses.

Inspiration is for amateurs - the rest of us just show up and get to work. And the belief that things will grow out of the activity itself and that you will - through work - bump into other possibilities and kick open other doors that you would never have dreamt of if you were just sitting around looking for a great "art idea."