Lloyd Alexander Quotes

If you don't keep pushing the limits, you wake up one day and you're the "center square to block."

I think what's really important is to challenge yourself. You can very easily fall into the rut of, 'We know it works! We'll use that old chestnut.'

The biggest trap, the biggest dungeon in life isn't laziness or bad luck, it's comfort.

Why should I keep doing things that I've done before?

I have a massive fear of going stale and falling into a comfort zone.

One of my biggest sources of angst is having people so comfortable with a formula that works that they are not challenging themselves or their ideas.

In success there's a tendency to keep on doing what you were doing.

Nobody has ever thought himself to death. The chief danger confronting us is not age. It is laziness, sloth, routine, stupidity, - forcing their way in like wind through the shutters, seeping into the cellar like swamp water.

If perfect's what you're searching for, then just stay the same.

If you withdraw into yourself, you run the risk of becoming egocentric. And stagnant water becomes putrid.

The danger is, you have a formula and you just repeat it.

If you can do something with your eyes closed, it is time to try something new.

It's supposed to feel totally foreign [to play in a series], every single time. But, going back for another go at it is good, on the one hand, but it's also bad, on another hand, because your ideas dry up sometimes, and also you get lazy sometimes because you're around the same people.

To rest upon a formula is a slumber that, prolonged, means death.

If I had a choice, if I had understood earlier that the reason my days were all the same was because I wanted them like that, perhaps.

A man's work is in danger of deteriorating when he thinks he has found the one best formula for doing it. If he thinks that, he is likely to feel that all he needs is merely to go on repeating himself . . . so long as a person is searching for better ways of doing his work, he is fairly safe.

No one should let themselves get used to anything.

If perfection is stagnation, then Heaven is a swamp.

We must not stay as we are, doing always what was done last time; or we shall stick in the mud.

I never want to feel complacent, and I had started to, a little bit. I had started to feel like "I have this thing I can do, it's worked a few times," but not only does that get boring, but you feel stagnant and unproductive. So I was feeling a lack of creativity and motivation, so I started making a more conscious choice to grow personally. It wasn't even an image-conscious thing, like, "I don't want people to think this way about me." It was really just a way to keep myself energized and feel excited about this thing I love doing. Like I went to couples therapy or something.

Men fall into a routine when they are tired and slack: it has all the appearance of activity with few of its burdens.

When we are constantly recreating our basic patterns of behavior and thought, we never have to leap into fresh air or onto fresh grass. Instead, we wrap ourselves in our own dark environment, where our only companion is the smell of our own sweat. In the cocoon, there is no dance, no walking or breathing. It is comfortable and sleepy, an intense and very familiar home.

When you carry yesterday's thinking into today, you program tomorrow to be like yesterday.

Tradition is laziness.

If you only do what you know and do it very, very well, chances are that you won't fail. You'll just stagnate, and your work will get less and less interesting, and that's failure by erosion