Robert J. Flaherty Quotes

You hear again and again that audiences want to see movies that are different, and critics say we make the same thing again and again in Hollywood, then you go and make something different, and you get kicked in the gut for it.

Whenever I felt happy about having discovered something, the first encounter, not only with the public, with other musicians, with specialists, etc, was that they rejected it.

People have laughed at all great inventors and discoverers.

When anyone starts out to do something creative - especially if it seems a little unusual - they seek approval, often from those least inclined to give it. But a creative life cannot be sustained by approval, any more than it can be destroyed by criticism - you learn this as you go on.

Every revolutionary poet or lyricist has been criticised for something. If you come up with something new, there will always be people who will object to it.

When you do anything completely different from a beaten path, many tend to pounce on you.

If your idea is truly innovative, you're going to hear from the naysayers. After all, if it really were such a good idea, someone would have already done it, right?

The best work usually meets the strongest opposition.

The thing about creativity is, people are going to laugh at it. Get over it.

You have enemies? Why, it is the story of every man who has done a great deed or created a new idea.

Exercise your imagination muscle! How many uses can you come up with for a flowerpot? Write down your answers. But don't write them in this book. Grab a separate sheet of paper. I didn't spend two and a half weeks writing a book just so you could mark up the pages with your silly ideas for things you can do with a flowerpot. When it comes down to it, what's wrong with a flowerpot not being a flowerpot? Why is nothing ever good enough for you?

Every new fad or fashion at once has its denouncers from the pulpit, platform, professor's chair.

It's interesting when something new comes along, a band of dwarfs playing electronic harps or something, but I'm not searching.

Pioneering is never done in front of cheerleaders urging on a roaring grandstand of popular approval.

You'll never do anything creative, innovative or world changing if you fear criticism. Pioneers are easy targets for arrows!

I'm not saying I'm impervious to criticism.

It used to worry me what people said about me. I'm learning not to worry as much. Sometimes you feel critics are wrong all the time, but I don 't take objection to it, because that's the way it goes. They can be wrong, they can be right. They can be cruel, they can be kind.

Entrepreneurship is a process, not a job or profession. So be faithful to the process and remember that even when times are bad, the process will give you a glimpse of the future that lies ahead.

Of course, people will laugh at you, but people laugh at a great many things so there is no need to take it personally.

All that was great in the past was ridiculed, condemned, combated, suppressed — only to emerge all the more powerfully, all the more triumphantly from the struggle.

When you invent something, there will always be people to criticise. God's creation is full of critics, but has God given up His creation because of the critics?

The whole world can gossip about you, and if you don't take it personally you are immune.

There should be a dash of the amateur in criticism. For the amateur is a man of enthusiasm who has not settled down and is not habit bound.

It consisteth in one knows not what, and springeth up one can hardly tell how. Its ways are unaccountable and inexplicable, being answerable to the numberless rovings of fancy and windings of language.

Do you create anything, or just criticize others work and belittle their motivations?