Jacqueline Woodson Quotes

The river is constantly turning and bending and you never know where it's going to go and where you'll wind up. Following the bend in the river and staying on your own path means that you are on the right track. Don't let anyone deter you from that.

My folks were very practical. They were also kind of able to think outside of the box. They were not going to let circumstance paralyze them. They knew sometimes you just had to take some new initiative. I think they passed that on to all of us... If you don't find a way, you make one.

It's not about your resources, it's about your resourcefulness .

It's not resources but resourcefulness that ultimately makes the difference.

You need to be honest and always see new opportunities coming. So I call it intuition, innovation, execution - these are my working principles.

You gotta be able to change worlds.

I always try to take the unexpected things and make them work for me.

With each job that you're given an opportunity to do, you're asked to use new parts of yourself and to figure the play out with other tools that you perhaps didn't use with the last show.

I had noticed that many of these successful people, historical and contemporary, shared certain common traits. They had a way of thinking that was exceptionally fluid; they could adapt to almost any circumstance; when confronted with problems, they could look at them from novel perspectives and solve them.

As producers, you always have to go with the flow and be ready to embrace change, and drama and whatever happens.

As the world we live in is so unpredictable, the ability to learn and to adapt to change is imperative, alongside creativity, problem-solving, and communication skills.

If someone can't give me a good reason why you can't do something, I find a way to do it.

There's a key for every door, and if you can't find it, you can make one. That's always an option.

It's not the style that motivates me, as much as an attitude of openness that I have when I go into a project.

You can always think that we're old and not innovative, but there is no company that can limp on for 139 years without being creative and having the genes to change.

Without an open-minded mind, you can never be a great success.

But I love the idea - whether it's in my work or where I live - exploring new frontier, and I like putting myself in strange places and trying to survive and figure things out and gather up an infrastructure. I like knowing that I could figure out a way to live anywhere.

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

I want to walk through life instead of being dragged through it.

I just find things that work and embellish them.

I was always taught to let the obstacles be your guide because they lead you to places that you wouldn't have gone on your own. Instead of going through a rock, you go around it, creating a path.

Creativity has always depended on openness and flexibility, so let us hope for more of both in the future.

We can always find creative ways to do things.

Part of being innovative in government is sometimes not trying to plot out the last chapter of the book, but to be open and see what comes back.

If I need something, I'll invent it.