Anthony Burgess Quotes

I really like to experiment. That's the only way I can work. It's instinctive.

You just go for it and see what works. There are no rules.

When in doubt, make a fool of yourself. There is a microscopically thin line between being brilliantly creative and acting like the most gigantic idiot on earth. So what the hell, leap.

We don't always know what we're doing. We often just get excited, put something down, and say, 'Oh, neat'.

With any new medium, the full power is only unearthed with experimentation.

I miss that thing I used to do when I first started out where I would just spontaneously generate ideas and try things and see where they'd go.

If you wait until the right time to have a child you'll die childless, and I think film making is very much the same thing. You just have to take the plunge and just start shooting something even if it's bad.

In order to innovate, you have to experiment.

I love to play things that are out-of-the-box. It's just that I don't always get the chance to do it!

In my work, I have never had any use for anything that I have known in advance.

I'm not a trained chef, so I end up making stuff up. It either turns out brilliant or an absolute disaster. I just go for it.

My methodology is not knowing what I'm doing and making that work for me.

There are people who say that you can't experiment... That condemns you to failure.

It might be a huge hit, it might not; but you learn something doing it.

It is the essence of innovation to fail most of the time.

If you're not prepared to be wrong, you'll never come up with anything original.

I like doing things that are different, unexpected, and where I feel that either the role feels like a natural fit for me or it's a really big swing that I don't know if I'm going to connect on.

I did everything by the seat of my pants. That's why I got hurt so much.

We love it when we make mistakes that are better than something you could think up.

An essential aspect of creativity is not being afraid to fail

Whenever I've done anything where I feel like, 'Oh, it would be smart to do that,' it's always been a mistake. Whenever I do the 'Oh, it would be fun to do that,' it's always paid dividends.

I think when you take the big swings - and I've done plenty of big swings that I was told were never going to work - those are always the things that break through.

Screwing things up is a virtue. Being correct is never the point. I have an almost fanatically correct assistant, and by the time she re-spells my words and corrects my punctuation, I can't read what I wrote. Being right can stop all the momentum of a very interesting idea.

So much of making movies is about discovery on the day, what you're figuring out. If you know everything going in, then it's not worth doing - it's already done.

Innovation requires an experimental mindset.