Haruki Murakami Quotes

The best ideas and the most useful and ground-breaking are often, though not always, in one sense, very simple ideas.

Big ideas are usually simple ideas.

I pay attention to what's going on around me. I'm always looking for new energy, new talent, new voices. When you do that I think it's easier to come up with fresh ideas. It's not that my career has been based on surprising people, but it's been about challenging myself - to constantly do new things that are going to broaden my own mind and in the process, hopefully, connect with other people.

It's easy to see that two people might come up with that same idea.

It takes a thousand men to invent a telegraph, or a steam engine, or a phonograph, or a photograph, or a telephone or any other important thing-and the last man gets the credit and we forget the others. He added his little mite - that is all he did. These object lessons should teach us that ninety-nine parts of all things that proceed from the intellect are plagiarisms, pure and simple; and the lesson ought to make us modest. But nothing can do that.

Ultimately ideas come out of a temperament or a sensibility, they are a crystallization or a precipitation of temperament.

When will the arbitrary be granted the place it deserves in the formation of works and ideas?

Now in creative thought common sense is a bad master. Its sole criterion for judgement is that the new ideas shall look like the old ones. In other words it can only work by suppressing originality.

Nobody needs a movie to give them an idea.

Trust your intuition and be resilient. If you have real breakout ideas, even your friends will laugh at you secretly until you can prove their viability.

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

Knowledge is the stuff from which new ideas are made. Thus, the real key to being creative lies in what you do with your knowledge.

Start with a style and you are in chains, start with an idea and you are free.

New ideas are one of the most overrated concepts of our time. Most of the important ideas that we live with aren't new at all.

Is it an original idea? Or is it something where you're literally a creative collagist? You're taking pieces of the world that you see around you and that are inside of you and put them together in a way that you see fit.

Copying isn’t particularly creative work. Being inspired by someone else’s idea to produce something new and different IS creative work.

A conditioned mind may be inventive; it may think up new ideas, new phrases, new gadgets; it may build a dam, plan a new society, and all the rest of it; but that is not creativity. Creativity is something much more than the mere capacity to acquire a technique. It is because this extraordinary thing called creativity is not in most of us that we are so shallow, empty, insufficient. And only the mind that is free can be creative.

The actual and valuable material of all human utterances —is plagiarism. For substantially all ideas are second-hand, consciously and unconsciously drawn from a million outside sources, and daily used by the garnerer with a pride and satisfaction born of the superstition that he originated them; whereas there is not a rag of originality about them anywhere except the little discoloration they get from his mental and moral calibre and his temperament, and which is revealed in characteristics of phrasing.

Ideas are a dime a dozen. People who implement them are priceless.

When we are exalted by ideas, we do not owe this to Plato, but to the idea, to which also Plato was debtor.

So many new ideas are at first strange and horrible though ultimately valuable that a very heavy responsibility rests upon those who would prevent their dissemination.

No idea is original, there's nothing new under the sun, it's never what you do, but how it's done

The public values the invention more than the inventor does. The inventor knows there is much more and better where this came from.

Never hesitate to steal a good idea.