Alexander Graham Bell Quotes

The answer to the question "where do good ideas come from" is always the same, the come from bad ideas. If you come up with 20 bad ideas you get one good one.

Usually, if you have a new idea, you very rarely break through to anything like recognizable development or implementation of that idea the first time around - it takes two or three goes for the research community to return to the topic.

For me, I'd rather be the inventive one, and if something doesn't work, I'll go back to the workshop, put it on the bench, and pound on it for awhile.

Ideas do not always come in a flash but by diligent trial-and-error experiments that take time and thought.

'Humans of New York' did not result from a flash on inspiration. It grew from five years of experimenting, tinkering, and messing up.

Wes Anderson is a perfectionist, so you have to just be ready to try it this way, try it this way, try it that way, and then try it this way. And then, once you think you've got it all and it's done, then you're going to be called back in two or three months so you can try it that way and try it this way. You've got to give him all of it.

None of my inventions came by accident. I see a worthwhile need to be met and I make trial after trial until it comes. What it boils down to is one per cent inspiration and ninety-nine per cent perspiration.

Timing, perseverance, and ten years of trying will eventually make you look like an overnight success.

That's the thing that always stuck out to me - the idea that quantity becomes quality. I always took it to mean if you do anything enough, if you keep putting effort in, eventually something will happen, with or without you. You don't have to have faith when you start out, you just have to dedicate yourself to practice as if you have it.

Art doesn't spring from the muses alone, but from hard work.

As a comic, you try something and if it works you go with it and grind it to death.

I wish somebody had given me the news that ideas don't just fall on your head like fairy dust. You have to treat that like a job. You have to spend hours each day, where you're just like, 'This is the part of the day when I'm looking for an idea.'

No great thing is created suddenly.

I love making stuff. There's a joy in having the first molecule of an idea, then testing it in front of audiences at secret shows that people only know about the day before. I videotape those, study them, enjoy being in the character and figuring out the movie.

I like to start with the ordinary, and then nudge it, and then think, 'What happens next, what happens next?'

I think if I try to develop a formula, it ends up not working.

Much can often be learned by the repetition under different conditions, even if the desired result is not obtained.

I've had so many little ideas I've written down here and there. Some ideas I've got reams of notes for.

You feel the music needs something but you don't know what. So you start searching, fitting, measuring, trying. Every time you try another angle. And sometimes that's frustrating, especially if you don't come up with something for three days.

I like to tell students, 'I didn't burst on to the literary scene.' I'm never good at things at the beginning. I was terrible at the start. I need to work and work.

I begin with an idea and then it becomes something else.

The problem is that once I start on a song and get a rough idea of where I might go with an arrangement, I try dozens, sometimes hundreds, of different things on a song. The bass, the backing guitars, the lead guitars, the keyboards. It's a long process. It's like 100 steps forward and 99 steps back.

What my work is, is my approach to it. It's the practice. And my work is about the effort that I make to get there. And I think if there's anything artistic, it's in that middle space.

Home wasn't built in a day.