Ideas are of themselves extraordinarily valuable, but an idea is just an idea. Almost anyone can think up an idea. The thing that counts is developing it into a practical product.
It's the business of movies, it's the fights that go along with the level of budget, and more than anything, it's the creative constipation of having to live with one idea for two or three years. It's just not that fun.
...I am driven on by an idea that I really only grasp as it grows with the picture.
All good ideas are terrible... Until people realize they are obvious. If you're not willing to live through the terrible stage, you'll never get to the obvious part.
At the start of the process the idea is just a thought - very fragile and exclusive. When the first physical manifestation is created everything changes. It is no longer exclusive, now it involves a lot of people.
You know, writing isn't easy. It's tedious. Ideas have a gestation period, and after a while, it becomes difficult.
Usage is like oxygen for ideas. That means every moment you're working on something without it being in the public it's actually dying, deprived of the oxygen of the real world.
You cannot force ideas. Successful ideas are the result of slow growth. Ideas do not reach perfection in a day, no matter how much study is put upon them.
A writer's notebook is the best way in the world to immortalize bad ideas. My idea about a good idea is one that sticks around and sticks around and sticks around.
Do not covet your ideas.
The task of a writer consists of being able to make something out of an idea.
No idea for a new growth business ever comes fully shaped. When it emerges, it's half-baked, and it then goes through a process of becoming fully shaped.
A thought functions only as a fragmentary part in the formulation of an idea.
It's the disease of thinking that a having a great idea is really 90% of the work. And if you just tell people, 'here's this great idea,' then of course they can go off and make it happen. The problem with that is that there's a tremendous amount of craftsmanship between a having a great idea and having a great product.
An idea you have might not be original. But by creating a novel out of that idea you can make it original.
When you get an idea, it's not going to be a great idea until you push it. You’ve got to push it until it’s uncomfortable. And then you’ve got to ask yourself, ‘Does my project say to my audience what I want it to say?’ ”
Charles Bean is a brilliant director. I come in with an idea and try to do it, but I fall on my face. And then, he says, 'Wait a minute, there was a little moment in there. Let's try that moment and expand in that direction.'
When I'm writing, I generally toy with an idea until it manifests itself - meaning a phrase or a tune comes into my head and eventually begins to jell. When something hits me, I write it down immediately. I don't wait, or it's gone.
I tend to [have] a lot of ideas but then just leave them in that infant form and kind of move on.
Talk and write in a way that encourages the mutual exchange of ideas and acts like a midwife to people birthing their own ideas.
When we have a brilliant idea, instead of making others think it is ours, why not let them cook and stir the idea themselves.
I do think that I'm a big believer in having an idea or having ideas and just tucking them away in the back of your brain. Even if you aren't consciously thinking of them, I think they simmer. You're working on them, even if you don't know you're working on them, and I think having something in your head for a while is a valuable thing.
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.
Good ideas stay with you until you eventually write the story.
I think it is the general rule that the originator of a new idea is not the most suitable person to develop it, because his fears of something going wrong are really too strong... At age 69.
