Walter Isaacson Quotes

I use doodling for a variety of reasons: I use it to get clarity around a concept, I use it to relax, I use it to communicate ideas with others and get their refinement of them, I use it to map complex systems for companies, I use it to run innovation games for business, I use it to get insight on something puzzling me.

I think that everything is part of creativity - the more you create, the more you have ideas, and the more you meet people.

The world needs a better understanding of how to encourage innovation. And innovators need to get better at it. Sign me up.

I don't design. I get what I think is a big idea, and I put the idea down. I'm not a designer. I'm a communicator.

For one person who is blessed with the power of invention, many will always be found who have the capacity of applying principles.

I like to come up with new ideas and see them grow.

If you have the words, there's always a chance that you'll find the way.

Good ideas come from bad ideas, but only if there are enough of them.

Research: the distance between an idea and its realization.

You can never discard too many bad ideas.

Improvement makes strait roads, but the crooked roads without Improvement, are roads of Genius.

Progress is often just a good idea away.

The inventor is a man who looks around upon the world and is not contented with things as they are. He wants to improve whatever he sees, he wants to benefit the world; he is haunted by an idea. The spirit of invention possesses him, seeking materialization.

[...] beer results in ideas, which results in new code.

To have ideas one must have imagination. To express ideas one must have science.

Where ideas are concerned, America can be counted on to do one of two things: Take a good idea and run it completely into the ground, or take a bad idea and run it completely into the ground.

The first step in innovation is to know that a thing can be created. After that, the rest is a matter of detail.

For me, trying to articulate the world to help people see it in a way they haven't seen it before is hugely important. Sometimes, you have to take something that is completely inexplicable and say, 'Look, here is the beating heart of something you must understand.'

I think we always move from imitation to assimilation to innovation, but I can't name you 20 people outside those we've already recognized who ever got to point three: innovation.

The phenomenon of creativity, we know, is closely related to the ability to yoke together separate, and even seemingly incompatible, matrices.

Ideas are cheap. Always be passionate about ideas and communicating those ideas and discoveries to others in the things you make.

There's nothing efficient about innovation.

Creativity is what transforms.

The principle goal of education in the schools should be creating men and women who are capable of doing new things, not simply repeating what other generations have done.

I just invent, then wait until man comes around to needing what I've invented.