Harold Prince Quotes

Part of being the successful Pixar is that we will take risks on teams and ideas, and some of them won't work out. We only lose from this if we don't respond to the failures. If we respond, and we think it through and figure out how to move ahead, then we're learning from it. That's what Pixar is.

The three foundations of judgement: Bold Design, Constant Practice, and Frequent Mistakes.

Anybody can build a company and sell the company the next day. That doesn't make you special, it doesn't make you unique, it doesn't make you all that great.

In the business world today, failure is apparently not an option. We need to change this attitude toward failure - and celebrate the idea that only by falling on our collective business faces do we learn enough to succeed down the road.

Progress is hard to measure in any creative endeavor, I think. It's often a matter of instinct, of feeling your way through what works and what doesn't.

As an entrepreneur, you are constantly playing in uncharted territory, and sometimes things don't work out. That doesn't mean you failed; it just means you may be off course.

If you aren't making any mistakes, you aren't innovating. If you're making the same mistakes, you aren't learning.

Follow a trail of bold mistakes and at the end of them you will find a genius.

I have not failed 10,000 times. I have succeeded in proving that those 10,000 ways will not work.

Think of a fine painter attempting to capture an inner vision, beginning with one corner of the canvas, painting what she thinks should be there, not quite pulling it off, covering it over with white paint, and trying again, each time finding out what her painting isn't, until she finally finds out what it is. And when you finally do find out what one corner of your vision is; you're off and running.

You do stuff that gets a reaction and you think 'that's a winner' and then it never sees the light of day. But the thing with improvisation is that 90% of what you come up with won't be used and for good reason. But you keep going for the occasional gem that you might come up with. You do a scene and a lot of the time. We wouldn't cut. So, you come up with something that might be funny and then you go, 'alright, what else'? So, you kind of throw stuff against the wall and see what happens. But you've got to be prepared to make a fool of yourself.

The greatest successes grow out of great failures. In numerous instances the result is better that comes after a series of abortive experiences than it would have been if it had come at once; for all these successive failures induce a skill which is so much additional power working into the final achievement.... The hand that evokes such perfect music from the instrument has often failed in its touch, and bungled among the keys.... Every disappointed effort fences in and indicates the only possible path of success, and makes it easier to find.

Every failure teaches a man something, to wit, that he will probably fail again.

One of the most valuable lessons I learned...is that we all have to learn from our mistakes, and we learn from those mistakes a lot more than we learn from the things we succeeded in doing.

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.

I think what you've seen them do recently in the markets is what most of us learn doesn't ultimately work. But I think everyone has to figure that on their own.

If you are going to try and change things, you had better have your wits about you.

There are but few who have ideas and are, at the same time, capable of action. Ideas enlarge but stymie, action enlivens but confines.

Perhaps creativity is fumbling that dance step, or driving the chisel the wrong way into the stone.

It's how creativity works. Especially in humans. For every good idea, ten thousand idiotic ones must first be posed, sifted, tried out, and discarded. A mind that's afraid to toy with the ridiculous will never come up with the brilliantly original.

Failure shows us the way - by showing us what isn't the way.

If you do improvising, it can sometimes end up being a waste of time. And if you do that, it's more or less based on a writing process.

You're not always going to hit the bull's-eye. I'm going to make movies that work and I'm going to make movies that don't work, and that's just a part of being creative. Because really, I think if you're taking risks and you're pushing yourself and you're doing things that scare you, you are going to fall on your face, and it's not always going to work.

Just as we may learn from our successes (how to do it) so also can we learn from our mistakes (how not to do it). It just isn't in the cards that anybody should get by forever without making mistakes and perhaps sometimes making costly ones.

Missing the mark is one of the ways in which we learn to hit the target.