Maria Semple Quotes

Recent studies have shown that our creativity is increased by 60% when we're walking. I encourage my workshop participants to write at their desks but think on their feet.

Only creativity can see past problems to find solutions. This holds true for every area of life.

My solution to the problem of unleashing creativity is always to set up a target.

Most people have their best ideas when they take their minds away from problems they're trying to solve.

I go to bed late. My mind starts going at night - that's when those creative juices begin flowing.

Successful creative adults seem to combine the wide-ranging exploration and openness we see in children with the focus and discipline we see in adults.

When I feel like I'm doing my best work, there is a bit of a freedom, a bit of flight that you're not so much losing yourself but you're sort of in the zone.

When we sit down to work, we become like a magnetized rod that attracts iron filings. Ideas come. Insights accrete.

The people who built Silicon Valley were engineers. They learned business, they learned a lot of different things, but they had a real belief that humans, if they worked hard with other creative, smart people, could solve most of humankind's problems. I believe that very much.

When I feel difficulty coming on, I switch to another book I'm writing. When I get back to the problem, my unconscious has solved it.

The imagination is how things get done. You have to cultivate creativity.

Confidence in the human capacity for problem solving, for invention, for innovation.

Creative power flourishes only when I am living in the present.

Solving problems should be a joy, a welcome challenge to our creativity.

When we sit down each day and do our work, power concentrates around us... Ideas come. Insights accrete.

For me, creativity includes problem-solving. That's the broad definition of it.

If you want to make computers that really work, create a design team composed only of healthy, active women with lots else to do in their lives, and give them carte blanche.

When you're working well, you don't do research. Whatever you need comes to you.

You don't have to work for Google, or any of the other firms encouraging staff to pursue personal projects on company time, to use slowness to unlock your creativity. Anyone can do it. Start by clearing space in your schedule for rest, daydreaming and serendipity. Take breaks away from your desk, especially when you get stuck on a problem.

There is only one real happiness in life, and that is the happiness of creating.

Juggling many projects and having all these accidental collisions that you can't predict enables a kind of comparative thinking. To focus on a single project from beginning to end is extremely difficult, not just for me, but for many people.

Even in technology, you have the freedom to solve a problem your way, you see. But it naturally sits in a certain framework whereas, in the physics, everybody had to come up with his own idea what he was going to do.

When the ideas are coming, I don't stop until the ideas stop because that train doesn't come along all the time.

I think we've all been in the middle of doing something we cared about, when someone coming in the room and saying 'hello' was annoying. I personally can understand that, as someone who tries to create.

When I'm writing, I write every day. It's lovely when that's happening. One day dovetailing into the next. Sometimes I don't even know what day of the week it is.