Guy Davenport Quotes

Most organizations do not value imagination, do not encourage it, do not reward it. In many cases, they don't even think about it. But if you're not thinking about imagination, I guarantee you're not going to have meaningful innovation.

Man is a genius when he is dreaming.

Imagination comes of not having things.

Imagination is more important than knowledge.

We value feeling over knowing, because you can't prove something that hasn't been done before.

Sometimes I have these abstract ideas and then lose track of myself.

Humans are very imaginative animals.

What you make up in your heads sticks if it's good, falls out if it's bad. If we still remember something a day after we made it up, it might be worth building on.

A disaster where marble has been substituted for imagination.

One way we can enliven the imagination is to push it toward the illogical. We're not scientists. We don't always have to make the logical, reasonable leap.

Originality is simply a pair of fresh eyes.

When the brain gets lost, it doesn't stop working. It tries to makes sense of things. It begins to speculate and guess, and that's when things open up. That's exciting.

I've come to realize that most good ideas are precisely the ones you can't describe.

You never know when your ideas are going to come back to you.

No amount of skillful invention can replace the essential element of imagination.

We've all forgotten how to be original.

We especially need imagination in science.

The most beautiful things are those that madness prompts and reason writes.

Knowledge is a polite word for dead but not buried imagination.

Worst ideas? Me? Whatever do you mean? There are no bad ideas.

The imagination is the golden pathway to everywhere.

There is no science in creativity. If you don't give yourself room to fail, you won't innovate.

There can be no technique or formula for creativity.

You have to be as original as possible. It's a tough thing to come up with something totally original.

I apply the term 'creativity' broadly... it's problem solving. We are all faced with problems, and we have to address them and think of something new, and that's where creativity comes in.