Howard Aiken Quotes

Do not covet your ideas.

Actually, everything has been said in print... it's a battle of giants and it's something that Walt would say is none of your business - go right on and create the best you can.

If you do come up with a new idea, in 4 seconds it will belong to somebody else.

The best ideas lose their owners and take on lives of their own.

Someone very smart once said to me, "Steal, don't borrow." So if there's anything good in anything anyone else does, it's fair game. I think that everything I've ever done at some point is part of someone else's legacy.

Picasso had a saying - 'good artists copy, great artists steal' - and we have always been shameless about stealing great ideas.

Never hesitate to steal a good idea.

I don't think anybody came into the movie business to be unoriginal and plagiarising and not having an original idea in their brain.

A lot of my business is about protecting creativity.

Don't worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you'll have to ram them down people's throats.

Nobody owns comedy. Nobody owns a premise. Nobody owns an idea.

The good old days, when each idea had an owner, are gone forever.

You don't have to release everything you do. Some ideas need to just stay on the shelf.

Often, I'm sitting opposite a client, and I'm thinking, 'How do I convince him to not copy the best-selling product out there?' And sometimes I don't know. Really, it's smarter to be a thief.

Genius Borrows nobly.

Don't worry about people stealing your design work. Worry about the day they stop.

The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources.

You can find truly original pieces of writing, but they're original because you go, "Who would have even have thought of that?," or, "Why would anyone ever want to go see that?"

If we want a better original idea, we must generate our own before we screen others' suggestions.

We're just gonna keep making things and challenging ourselves to make them more cheaply and more renegade and more interesting. That's the only thing we might challenge ourselves to do in the age of so many movies and so many TV shows. We're aware that we're asking time of people to watch stuff, and that there's so much stuff to watch, so we're gonna try to offer you something unique. And it may not always succeed, but it will definitely be different.

It's impossible for me to feel like there's only one way to do a thing. There's nothing wrong with having one way of doing it, but I think it's a bad habit. I believe in range. Like, there's a lot of tunes that I play all the time-sometimes I hear 'em in a different register. And if you don't have complete freedom, or you won't let yourself get away from that one straight line, oh, my goodness, that's too horrible to even think about.

One of the reasons I love making movies is because it's an opportunity to share with the world a different way of being or a different way of living or seeing the world. If it's something you've already seen before, if I have too many reference points for it, then it's not exciting for me to make.

Chance is another name that we give to our mistakes. And all of the best things in my films are mistakes.

If you're purely derivative in what you do, then you could very easily get lost along the way. But for me, I might want to even do something else for a while.

You cannot play for safety and make art.