Joanna Coles Quotes

I'm not following anybody's tracks, I'm making my own baby.

Don't look at all at what other people are doing. Think of what you're doing as completely fresh because if you imitate you're dead.

I followed my own self and individuality so much that it automatically made me a game changer or set me apart from others. I did not think it was necessary to do things the way others are doing it.

I get a kick out of being an outsider constantly. It allows me to be creative.

I just like doing things from my own head.

Doing it your own way, not having to go exactly by the book to be successful.

The hardest thing is the idea. Ideas come from somewhere but as far as we know they come from nowhere.

I was always a rebel in the sense that I always wanted to go my own road and do something that nobody else has done.

Creativity is a spark. It can be excruciating when we're rubbing two rocks together and getting nothing. And it can be intensely satisfying when the flame catches and a new idea sweeps around the world.

The creative individual has the capacity to free himself from the web of social pressures in which the rest of us are caught. He is capable of questioning the assumptions that the rest of us accept.

I never follow anybody's path, what they've done.

That's the buzz for me, the creative process. An idea is never as good as when it's in your head. And then it's just how little you ruin it.

I've never tried to be accepted. When everyone is doing one thing, I've always had the instinct to go the other way. I don't understand how an individual with their own mind, their own values, and their own beliefs can be so willing to just follow what everybody else is doing. How can you make history doing what everybody else is doing?

I don't want to follow in the footsteps of anybody that went before, because they didn't do what I want to do.

I don't like following in people's footsteps; I like making my own trail.

Where do ideas come from? Ideas come from other ideas.

Never follow the crowd. Go where it's empty.

The great challenge which faces us is to assure that, in our society of big-ness, we do not strangle the voice of creativity, that the rules of the game do not come to overshadow its purpose, that the grand orchestration of society leaves ample room for the man who marches to the music of another drummer.

Every piece of technology, every piece of art, basically everything manmade comes from an idea.

It's how creativity works. Especially in humans. For every good idea, ten thousand idiotic ones must first be posed, sifted, tried out, and discarded. A mind that's afraid to toy with the ridiculous will never come up with the brilliantly original.

You can't have good ideas unless you have lots of ideas.

I have created a life by stepping out of the box of people's limitations. I call it zigging when others are zagging.

A creative life cannot be sustained by approval, any more than it can be destroyed by criticism.

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

Men have been taught that it is a virtue to agree with others. But the creator is the man who disagrees. Men have been taught that it is a virtue to swim with the current. But the creator is the man who goes against the current. Men have been taught that it is a virtue to stand together. But the creator is the man who stands alone.