Tom Wujec Quotes

We very much use a prototyping model, play with ideas, and then get stuff started that way, which is how the greatest projects get started.

Don't be afraid to stumble. Any inventor will tell you that you don't follow a plan far before you strike a snag. If, out of 100 ideas you get one that works, it's enough.

You always start with a fantasy. Part of the fantasy technique is to visualize something as perfect. Then with the experiments you work back from the fantasy to reality, hacking away at the components.

You have a lot of ideas …. I want them so I can test them.

You can't have good ideas unless you have lots of ideas.

When you're in the editing process, you try different things and you get creative ideas.

I enjoy creating new ideas, working on new creative projects.

Ideas must be put to the test. That's why we make things, otherwise they would be no more than ideas. There is often a huge difference between an idea and its realisation. I've had what I thought were great ideas that just didn't work.

I'll stop when I run out of ideas.

If I have an idea in my head, within no time it's into the computer, it may take more time to make it sound right, but that's the only issue.

I always start out with an idea, even a boring idea, that becomes a question I don't have answers to.

The fact is that one new idea leads to another, that to a third and so on through a course of time, until someone, with whom no one of these ideas was original, combines all together, and produces what is justly called a new invention.

The answer to the question "where do good ideas come from" is always the same, the come from bad ideas. If you come up with 20 bad ideas you get one good one.

When I get an idea I start at once building it up in my imagination. I change the construction, make improvements and operate the device in my mind. It is absolutely immaterial to me whether I run my turbine in my thought or test it in my shop. I even note if it is out of balance.

Every piece of technology, every piece of art, basically everything manmade comes from an idea.

Invention consists in the capacity of seizing on the capabilities of a subject, and in the power of moulding and fashioning ideas suggested to it.

What I tend to do is to wake about five in the morning-this happens quite often-think about the invention, and then image it in my mind in 3D, as a kind of construct. Then I do experiments with the image...sort of rotate it, and say, 'Well what'll happen if one does this?' And by the time I get up for breakfast I can usually go to the bench and make a string and sealing wax model that works straight off, because I've done most of the experiments already.

There’s never a wrong idea. You just keep throwing stuff out and inevitably there are elements of different things that inspire a character or environment.

Isn't the drawing board the place where all the best work happens? It's not a bad thing to go back there. It's the entire point.

I'm not a craftsman of graphics or art or film. I'm more of an idea generator and manufacturer.

You can't buy something which does not exist. In a way, let's make things exist and then judge later. Don't cancel the process of creativity too early; let it flow.

Well, what I try to do is throw as much mud on the wall as I possibly can and just see what sticks, what shines as quirky or more interesting that the others, and I try to cling onto that one, somehow join a link from there to there.

I almost literally wake up in the morning starting to think of my next idea. It's almost always driven by what's in the news. The hard part, really, is getting from knowing what I want to say to figuring out how to say it in an image. I'm still not entirely sure how to explain how that happens... Suddenly, something just works.

Try out your ideas by visualizing them in action.

You look at the world around you, and you take it apart into all its components. Then you take some of those components, throw them away, and plug in different ones, start it up and see what happens.