Editing while you're writing is like strangling the baby in the crib.
Interpretation
Editing during the writing process can stifle creativity and hinder the flow of ideas.
Quincy Jones uses a stark metaphor to convey that constantly editing or judging one's writing while in the creative process can be detrimental. It suggests that allowing ideas to flow freely without immediate criticism is essential for the birth of genuine creativity, similar to nurturing a baby rather than stifling it before it has a chance to grow.
In practice
During a writing workshop, a facilitator might say this quote to encourage participants to prioritize free expression over perfection.
Just blow in it and sound bad for about a year and then make it sound a little bit better, and you get a little band together, and then you get a few jobs. You take four guys that sound half bad, but if they're 25 percent each, they can give 100 percent, you know?
Music in movies is all about dissonance and consonance, tension and release.
When you produce an album, you're dealing with it theatrically. It has to have a structure, and the inner response to that is that the ear loves it.
You can study orchestration, you can study harmony and theory and everything else, but melodies come straight from God.
I got a scholarship to Seattle University and I was writing arrangements for singers and everybody. But the music course was too dry and I really wanted to get away from home.
I tell my kids and I tell proteges, always have humility when you create and grace when you succeed, because it's not about you. You are a terminal for a higher power. As soon as you accept that, you can do it forever.
It's how creativity works. Especially in humans. For every good idea, ten thousand idiotic ones must first be posed, sifted, tried out, and discarded. A mind that's afraid to toy with the ridiculous will never come up with the brilliantly original.
Before we start anything creatively, we have a firm understanding of our objective and our frame of mind for the campaign. Who's our audience, and what's their day-to-day behavior? How can we complement those behaviors? How is our message more than an interruption? Why would people care about what we're saying?
A cautious creative is an oxymoron.
Sometimes you have to stop thinking. Sometimes you shut down completely. I think that's true in any creative field.
Creativity means to push open the heavy, groaning doorway to life.
I think young people are the most creative and the coolest - people that we should be learning from. Even when I'm at a party, I'm analyzing it and thinking about it in the context of how I would write about it. That side of me never switches off.
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