W. Edwards Deming Quotes

If innovations were predictable, they wouldn't be discoveries.

So much of making movies is about discovery on the day, what you're figuring out. If you know everything going in, then it's not worth doing - it's already done.

One of the advantages of being disorderly is that one is constantly making exciting discoveries.

Chance is the only source of true novelty.

The biggest threat to a better life is the desire to keep the future under control - to make the world predictable by reining in creativity and enterprise. Progress as a neat blueprint, with no deviations and no surprise, may work in children's cartoons or utopian novels. But it's just a fantasy.

Some people are very lucky, and have the story in their heads. I've never storyboarded anything. I like the idea of chance. What makes God laugh is people who make plans.

I'm not a creature of habit. I like to find things from unexpected sources.

In my work, I have never had any use for anything that I have known in advance.

Innovation is serendipity, so you don't know what people will make.

You can never plan the future by the past.

What really excites me in a project is when it goes in a way you haven't been before.

In general, I don't know when inspiration will pop up.

The avantgarde are people who don't exactly know where they want to go, but are the first to get there.

I always try to keep that feeling of being on the edge. I'm afraid of knowing too well and seeming mechanical.

Art is lunging forward without certainty about where you are going or how to get there, being open to and dependent on what luck, the paint, the typo, the dissonance, give you. Without art you're stuck with yourself as you are and life as you think life is.

We love it when we make mistakes that are better than something you could think up.

I like to surprise myself. I've always been attracted to projects where I don't know how they're going to turn out.

Much of what we're going to try will not work, and much of what does work will do so for unanticipated reasons.

You never know where inspiration is going to come from.

The truth is, it is hard to know where ideas come from.

I often don't know what I'll be working on next year or a year from now. There is often a chance meeting, or something that I worked on 10 years ago suddenly becomes important again.

You never know where you're going to get inspiration.

No one knows what's a good idea or a bad idea until you try it.

I think I wanted my solo debut to be very unpredictable.

The desire to get from point A to point B in the shortest, most efficient amount of time without ever wandering off path, can mean you miss out on those happy accidents that push you further and faster in a direction you never even considered.