George Saunders Quotes

Tim Olyphant is a machine. He never stops thinking and being creative.

Though progress starts with the imagination, only work can make things happen. And work itself works best when fueled, again by the imagination.

Everyone thinks I must have been an ace in school. But I didn't work hard, I was lazy. I liked to be lazy. I thought laziness stimulated your imagination.

That adage about genius being 5 percent inspiration and 95 perspiration - it's true.

The power of work, and the power of creativity can be your salvation.

I have ideas every day, and if I'm not carrying a pad of paper, I'm typing it into the notes thing on my iPhone, and it's just ridiculous - idle hands are the devil's plaything, and I can't be the devil's plaything. I got to be the devil; I got to be the guy making it all happen.

When you have a creative mind it doesn't stop going.

Clean out a corner of your mind and creativity will instantly fill it.

I have ideas whirring around my head all the time.

As a teacher at Princeton, I'm surrounded by people who work hard so I just make good use of my time. And I don't really think of it as work - writing a novel, in one sense, is a problem-solving exercise.

I'm the laziest inventor you ever met. My inventing is in my head - I don't have to be in the lab working and sweating.

The best thing you can do when you're not feeling funny is go out and get more stimuli from the world, get out and walk around, read a book, go talk to some birds or a dog and replenish the well, as it were.

Amateurs wait for inspiration. The real pros get up and go to work.

Acting is easier - writing is more creative. The lazy man vies with the industrious.

You always need that spark of imagination. Sometimes I'm midway through a book before it happens. However, I don't wait for the muse to descend, I sit down every day and I work when I'm not delivering lambs on the farm.

Creativity is a habit, and the best creativity is the result of good work habits.

The best ideas come as jokes. Make your thinking as funny as possible.

I'm a creative person, so I have to stay busy.

I go to bed late. My mind starts going at night - that's when those creative juices begin flowing.

'Inspiration' is a word used by people who aren't really doing anything.

I don't think you can define how you acquire your imagination any more than you can define why one person has a sense of humor and another doesn't. But I certainly would lean to the side that says all those solitary hours of daydreaming were a kind of training for poetry.

Labor gives birth to ideas.

I do all of my good thinking at over 65 miles per hour. The speed limit is, luckily, the same speed as my brainstorming speed.

Beethoven, Wagner, Bach, and Mozart settled down day after day to the job in hand. They didn't waste time waiting for inspiration.

Creative thinking inspires ideas. Ideas inspire change.