Alain de Botton Quotes

The first essential in writing about anything is that the writer should have no experience of the matter.

You have to draw on a fair amount of experience in order to be able to put ideas together.

I refuse to write the same story twice. I keep experimenting. I keep learning how to work. I've been at it pretty much 50 years, and I'm now beginning to learn how to do the job well.

Science means constantly walking a tightrope between blind faith and curiosity; between expertise and creativity; between bias and openness; between experience and epiphany; between ambition and passion; and between arrogance and conviction - in short, between an old today and a new tomorrow.

The only real security that a man can have in this world is a reserve of knowledge, experience and ability.

We can invent only with memory.

Simplicity is the most difficult thing to secure in this world; it is the last limit of experience and the last effort of genius.

Skill is the unified force of experience, intellect and passion in their operation.

Experience is easy to provide and quickly put to good use by people with all the other qualities.

You learn something new on every film.

I'm good at what I do and still improving as I learn from mentors, founders, partners, friends, family, strangers, my own investors, and the experience itself.

Write about what you know, that's what I say.

The wise learn from the experience of others, and the creative know how to make a crumb of experience go a long way.

The best substitute for money is ingenuity.

Everything that I make I use.

To be creative, a person has to internalize the entire system that makes creativity possible. Creative individuals are remarkable for their ability to adapt to almost any situation and to make do with whatever is at hand to reach their goals.

You are always naked when you start writing; you are always as if you had never written anything before; you are always a beginner. Shakespeare wrote without knowing he would become Shakespeare

I have been successful probably because I have always realized that I knew nothing about writing and have merely tried to tell an interesting story entertainingly.

The human mind cannot create anything. It produces nothing until having been fertilized by experience and meditation; its acquisitions are the germs of its production.

When I start to write a song, I initially fall into patterns and creative habits that are familiar, and because they're familiar, they sound convincing. It's important for me to not pursue those ideas, because I've already done them, but to find ideas that are different and feel strange to write and disconcerting to write.

No one for a moment can pretend that printing is so great a discovery as writing, or algebra as a language.

The muscle memory of filtering away all the wrong versions of what you're doing improves the more time you're on a film set. I feel like my problem-solving algorithm got kicked up a notch.

Because they have so little, children must rely on imagination rather than experience.

Cooking is just as creative and imaginative an activity as drawing, or wood carving, or music. And cooking draws upon your every talent--science, mathematics, energy, history, experience--and the more experience you have, the less likely are your experiments to end in drivel and disaster. The more you know, the more you can create.