Rei Kawakubo Quotes

I enjoy creating. And if you can do it in a cool way, do it. You can't worry about disappointing people or what their expectations might be.

You think you've made something really great, but there's a reason why it's not resonating the way some previous work did. But it's not that easy to just replicate. Some people think, "Oh, just go do that thing you used to do before." But it just doesn't work like that. It's a lot more mysterious or slippery.

"Where do you get your ideas?" That's the one question I'm genuinely sick of being asked, and also genuinely fascinated by. What fascinates me is not that people ask the question, but what kind of answer are they really looking for? Because if I tell them the truth, which is "I make them up," they seem very disappointed. They want to know about the trek I do once a year to the mountain.

There is no thrill of mortal danger to surpass that of a lone man trying to create something that never existed before.

Creating a piece of software is always complicated because you're doing something new. If you just wanted something that had been done before you'd just use that old piece of software. So there are no repetitive tasks.

What you have felt and thought will by itself invent a new style, so that when people talk about style they are always a little astonished at the newness of it, because they think that it is only style that they are talking about, when what they are talking about is the attempt to express a new idea with such force that it will have the originality of the thought.It is an awfully lonesome business, and, as you know, I never wanted you to go into it, but if you are going into it at all, I want you to go into it knowing the sort of things that took me years to learn.

I have devoted 30 years of research to how creative people live and work, to make more understandable the mysterious process by which they come up with new ideas and new things. [...] If I had to express in one word what makes their personalities different from others, it's complexity. They show tendencies of thought and action that in most people are segregated. They contain contradictory extremes; instead of being an "individual", each of them is a "multitude".

Any human act that gives rise to something new is referred to as a creative act, regardless of whether what is created is a physical object or some mental or emotional construct that lives within the person who created it and is known only to him.

I've changed the way I look at things. When I put out a record or single I don't allow myself to set up expectations like, "This song must be a number one hit. Its got to sell X amount of records." I have fallen into that trap before.

I think that if you, as a comedian, are trying to be in people's face, then you've got to come up with new stuff every year. We're in a mass consumption phase where people take things for granted and want things to be instant when these are not things that can be instant.

Some days I have a knot in my stomach because I've got to sit down and come up with something in womenswear that no one else came up with.

A man becomes creative, whether he is an artist or scientist, when he finds a new unity in the variety of nature. He does so by finding a likeness between things which were not thought alike before.

But there's nothing more profound than creating something out of nothing.

They copied all they could copy, But they couldn't copy my mind; And I left them sweatin' and stealin', A year and a half behind.

My idea with my work is always to fashion something that's impossible to transpose into any other media.

The ROI of social media is that your business will still exist in 5 years.

Artistic inspiration ignores the law of supply and demand.

Sometimes listening to music can motivate you. It can. But if you're a musician, that isn't always the way to get new ideas because you don't want to take somebody else's ideas. You need to find your own. So if you go to different artistic mediums, whether it's dance or it's visual arts or films or books, stories, sometimes it gets you hearing things, hearing progressions that you wouldn't come up with if you were just listening to other music because you don't want to copy progressions you've just heard.

There are two types of genius; one which above all begets and wants to beget, and another which prefers being fertilized and giving birth.

Isn't the drawing board the place where all the best work happens? It's not a bad thing to go back there. It's the entire point.

Where there is creativity, there is hope.

There's nothing like the eureka moment of knocking off a song that didn't exist before - I won't compare it to sex, but it lasts longer.

Television and the way we watch is going to change dramatically in the next year.