David Cross Quotes

Jean Renoir once suggested that most true creators have only one idea and spend their lives reworking it, but then very rapidly he added that most people don't have any ideas at all, so one idea is pretty amazing.

You're not gonna write a hundred songs and have a hundred entirely different ideas. It's a matter of finding the ones that are the freshest and most unique.

Usually, the best ideas come from other people's good ideas, which then, after a short gestation period, become your ideas.

Never follow the crowd in what you do; the crowd has never produced anything of lasting quality, value or beauty.

I want to see something that I've never seen before, so how can I tell that actor what that is? I'm not trying to construct a document or situation that is what I want, because what I want is something new to me.

People are always talking about originality; but what do they mean? As soon as we are born, the world begins to work upon us; and this goes on to the end. And after all, what can we call our own, except energy, strength, and will? If I could give an account of all that I owe to great predecessors and contemporaries, there would be but a small balance in my favor.

"Where do you get your ideas?" That's the one question I'm genuinely sick of being asked, and also genuinely fascinated by. What fascinates me is not that people ask the question, but what kind of answer are they really looking for? Because if I tell them the truth, which is "I make them up," they seem very disappointed. They want to know about the trek I do once a year to the mountain.

There are people who are originals and the stuff they make really is new. It isn't based on anything else. But I've decided I'm not that-I was never that. My abilities are to synthesize a wide range of references and ideas into something that feels relatively unified and coherent.

If you don't have an idea, all you have is style.

...new ideas are merely several old thoughts that occur at the exact same time.

Just as no great painting has ever been created by a committee, no great vision has ever emerged from the herd.

We're all standing on the shoulders of what other people have done. But you're supposed to take that and add your own sauce. It can be intimidating, believe me.

The mark of highest originality lies in the ability to develop a familiar idea so fruitfully that it would seem no one else would ever have discovered so much to be hidden in it.

I knew naturally as a child not to forfeit my creativity to a world that's all laid out for me. I'll look at everything around me and vow to keep in mind that alla this is just someone's idea. It could have just as well been mine.

To be an artist, you have to nurture the things that most people discard.

Creativity gives hope that there can be a worthwhile idea.

Nobody has a monopoly on good ideas

Young people don't even consider that it's a good idea to be out on the fringe, which is where good ideas come from.

I think being in a place where there is nothing happening is very inspiring because you have to make your own fun, you are not reliant on imitating any other bands.

I have devoted 30 years of research to how creative people live and work, to make more understandable the mysterious process by which they come up with new ideas and new things. [...] If I had to express in one word what makes their personalities different from others, it's complexity. They show tendencies of thought and action that in most people are segregated. They contain contradictory extremes; instead of being an "individual", each of them is a "multitude".

All you need is your own imagination. So use it that's what it's for.

The principal mark of genius is not perfection, but originality.

You can’t really worry too much…about what the competition is doing or what other people in your field are doing. It has to be a true vision.

The ideas aren't that important. Really they aren't. Everyone's got an idea for a book, a movie, a story, a TV series.