Lorne Michaels Quotes

Limitations, be they practical or arbitrary, force artists to dig more deeply instead of settling for easy answers.

The enemy of art is the absence of limitations.

I think creativity is something that best happens when you have clear parameters. If you're not confined by anything then it's meaningless. You've got to rap over the beat, or you've got to color within your canvas. You pick the canvas size first. That makes most sense to me.

I've worked in network and cable on and off for a number of years, and you just understand what your parameters are. A lot of times, I think the best work that my team has come up with comes from having to deal with certain boundaries.

I'm a big believer in creating parameters for creativity. I think parameters make people more creative. So that starts with my budgets. I only do low budget movies, and I think that makes the movies better.

If you have total freedom to design, you won't get anything interesting. So I give myself restraints in order to kind of push myself through, to create something new. It's the torture that I give myself, the pain and the struggle that I go through.

Constraint inspires creativity

Don't be married to a line or verse if it can't rhyme, fit the meter, or doesn't fit the outline.

There are so many rules in the art world. I don't like rules and I break them all the time. I don't care if people think I'm overexposed. What I care about is if I'm going to run out of energy. Overexposure is only a problem if you are drained of energy and cannot come up with new ideas. Every artist has to recognize that and know when to stop for a moment.

The spirit of poetry, like all other living powers, must of necessity circumscribe itself by rules, were it only to unite power with beauty.

Art is limitation; the essence of every picture is the frame. If you draw a giraffe, you must draw him with a long neck. If in your bold creative way you hold yourself free to draw a giraffe with a short neck, you will really find that you are not free to draw a giraffe.

When the going gets tough, the tough reinvent.

I think nearly every artist continually wants to reach the edge of nothingness - the point where you can’t go any further.

Instead of being intimidated by the limitations, be inspired to find new ways around them.

Styles come and go, design goes on forever: solving communication problems with new tools applied to the same old common sense.

When I'm creatively solving problems, I'm in my sweet spot, and nothing can take me out of that joyful present.

There's a key for every door, and if you can't find it, you can make one. That's always an option.

Human creativity is unlimited. It is the capacity of humans to make things happen which didn't happen before. Creativity provides the key to solving our social and economic problems.

When you resort to violence to prove a point, you’ve just experienced a profound failure of imagination.

The imagination is unleashed by constraints. You break out of the box by stepping into shackles.

I get my by any means on, whenever there's a drought get your umbrellas out because that's when I brainstorm.

Being creative isn't confined to a specific set of professions -- everyone can and should be innovative.

Sheer necessity,-the proper parent of an art so nearly allied to invention.

When your parents regulate everything you hear and everything you intake, it forces you to get creative in other ways.

If you have total freedom to design, you won't get anything interesting. So I give myself restraints in order to kind of push myself through, to create something new. It's the torture that I give myself, the pain and the struggle that I go through. So it's self-given, but that's the only way, I think, to make a strong, good new creation.