Evan Williams Quotes

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

The problem is not one of prediction. It is one of imagination.

Solve problems, make art, think deeply.

Imagination decides everything.

Ideas sometimes come from nowhere, and sometimes they take lots of thinking.

An intellectual is a person who's found one thing that's more interesting than sex.

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

One very important aspect of motivation is the willingness to stop and to look at things that no one else has bothered to look at. This simple process of focusing on things that are normally taken for granted is a powerful source of creativity.

If I were to try and find a unifying emotion that kept me calm and focused while I was dancing or writing or solving a math problem, I think the one unifying thing about all those that keeps my interest is creativity.

There's also a sense of freedom. I was so obsessed by this problem that I was thinking about if all the time - when I woke up in the morning, when I went to sleep at night, and that went on for eight years.

I like to think about the future and how things can be done better than they are now. That's what engineers do.

Creativity can solve almost any problem.

The secret to life is to put yourself in the right lighting. For some, it's a Broadway spotlight; for others, a lamplit desk. Use your natural powers -- of persistence, concentration, and insight -- to do work you love and work that matters. Solve problems. make art, think deeply.

When I'm working on a problem, I never think about beauty. I think only how to solve the problem.

Talent jogs to conclusions to which Genius takes giant leaps.

Limits are possibilities. ... Formal restrictions, contrary to what you might think, free you up by allowing you to concentrate on purer ideas. ... You can be crippled by too many choices, especially if you don't know what your goals are.

Intelligence looks for what is known to solve problems. Creativity looks for what is unknown to discover possibilities.

Every problem has a creative solution.

An idea is a feat of association.

For us the great men are not those who solved the problems, but those whodiscovered them.

The best reaction to a paradox is to invent a genuinely new and deep idea.

Personally, I rather think that if you're not creative you've got a problem on your hands. If you are creative you've got a double problem.

Usually my 'a-ha' moments are when I'm not trying to think of how to solve a particular problem.

Think, the successful idea is always in your mind. Think it out.

Think inside the work - outside the work