Robert Hass Quotes

I've always been controversial because I offer new ideas. For me to be controversial, I think this is positive.

If everybody thinks you're out of your mind, you just might be onto something.

Coming up with a good idea, with an insight into the way the world works that is really new and that you really believe in, is a deeply satisfying experience.

I don't like to dwell on the past. I'm interested in Fischerandom now, I am working on a new clock, I'm trying to make chess a more exciting game today. I am not interested in sitting in my rocking chair thinking what I did 10, 20 or 30 years ago.

You have to think outside the box.

I'm a very creative person, and the best part about creation is creating. So I always love to come up with new things, new ideas, new thoughts. I cherish things like that.

The essence of creativity is figuring out how to use what you already know in order to go beyond what you already think.

Some of the best ideas come sort of out of nowhere and when you're not expecting it.

To the extent a person makes, invents or thinks something that is new to him, he may be said to have performed a creative act.

Creativity gives hope that there can be a worthwhile idea.

If filmmakers are ignorant of the past, they laborto re-invent the wheel in every picture. You sit and think, 'Well,we're back to 1903 here.'

The past is never where you think you left it.

I think we want to see new voices and new ideas emerge - that's part of the reason why term limits are a really useful thing.

When we conceive a new idea we are thinking directly from the creativity of God.

People with new ideas, people with the faintest capacity for saying something new, are extremely few in number, extraordinarily so, in fact.

Original thinking migrates each day in search of nourishment.

I don't think you can recreate anything from the past. You can not do it. If you're going to go out and imitate a Motown sound, you can't do it, it's impossible because of the studios and players involved and the atmosphere.

New ideas come into this world somewhat like falling meteors, with a flash and an explosion.

One of the basics of a good system of innovation is diversity. In some ways, the stronger the culture (national, institutional, generational, or other), the less likely it is to harbor innovative thinking. Common and deep-seated beliefs, widespread norms, and behavior and performance standards are enemies of new ideas. Any society that prides itself on being harmonious and homogeneous is very unlikely to catalyze idiosyncratic thinking. Suppression of innovation need not be overt. It can be simply a matter of peoples walking around in tacit agreement and full comfort with the status quo.

If you have had your attention directed to the novelties in thought in your own lifetime, you will have observed that almost all really new ideas have a certain aspect of foolishness when they are first produced, and almost any idea which jogs you out of your current abstractions may be better than nothing.

At the interface of the say-able and the unsay-able is the novel, the new, the never before seen, said or done. And that's what I think it's important to try and bring out, ideas. Because I think we are the animals that bring back ideas.

I pay attention to what's going on around me. I'm always looking for new energy, new talent, new voices. When you do that I think it's easier to come up with fresh ideas. It's not that my career has been based on surprising people, but it's been about challenging myself - to constantly do new things that are going to broaden my own mind and in the process, hopefully, connect with other people.

Now in creative thought common sense is a bad master. Its sole criterion for judgement is that the new ideas shall look like the old ones. In other words it can only work by suppressing originality.

Any idea can be a great idea if you think differently, dream big and commit to seeing it realized

I rummage around in artistic things from the past. If you don't understand the context, they wouldn't make any sense. I rummage around in conceptual ideas of the future, but if you don't know the source of the thinking, [it] wouldn't make any sense.