Quotes on Idea

You sang in church, you know, and you didn't act at all. You tried not to act, you tried to tell the truth. The idea of being a troubadour on the road singing for your supper was very disturbing to him.

And it was the idea that you can do a play - like a Shakespeare play, or any well-written play, Arthur Miller, whatever - and say things you could never imagine saying, never imagine thinking in your own life.

If you record the world honestly, there's no way people can stop being funny. A lot of fiction writing doesn't get that idea, as if to acknowledge it would trivialize the story or trivialize human nature, when in fact human nature is reduced and falsified if the comic aspects are not included.

I don't design. I get what I think is a big idea, and I put the idea down. I'm not a designer. I'm a communicator.

I paint and work as a sculptor, and I see architecture as an art... If you follow this approach you can use techniques to the service of man and to the service of an artistic idea, and beauty.

One thing hurts me. I keep hearing 'Terry Fox.' I'm not doing the run to become rich or famous... To me, being famous is not the idea of the run. The only important part is that cancer can be beaten.

I love singing jazz. I don't like the idea that classical music should be over here and jazz should be someplace else. It's all wonderful, and we should be open to enjoying it all.

Whenever I get an idea for a song, even before jotting down the notes, I can hear it in the orchestra, I can smell it in the scenery, I can see the kind of actor who will sing it, and I am aware of an audience listening to it.

Most innovative things are not obvious to other people at the time. You have to believe in yourself. If you've got a good idea, follow it even though others tell you it's not.

People are always selling the idea that people with mental illness are suffering. I think madness can be an escape. If things are not so good, you maybe want to imagine something better.

Whatever the creative industry, when you're confronted with the challenge of coming up with a Big Idea, always work with the most talented, innovative mind available. Hopefully... that's you.

We're always taught that we're building for permanence, but why? I like the idea of a prosthetic architecture! When a section is removed, the building readjusts its weight distribution, like a living body.

I don't have to come up with the best idea. It is my job to make sure that it is always the best idea that wins.

If I want to write a movie, I'll write a screenplay, but if I have an idea for a book, it's something that I think can only be done novelistically.

If there's one theme in all my work, it's about authenticity and self-expression. It's the idea that some things are, in some real sense, really you - or express what you and others aren't.

In a sense, by closing off the idea that young Muslims, and particularly young Muslim men, can be American heroes, it increases the chance that they'll try to be some other kind of hero. And that, I think, is entirely counterproductive.

Anytime you get an idea, you need people to help you put it together. That is the beginning of an institution. When you create an institution, levels of authority and boundaries need to be established. If everybody owns it, nobody owns it. If everybody is responsible for it, nobody will be responsible.

Women must be freed from the idea that they always have to stay young and that they must disfigure themselves at a certain age.

I always adhered to the idea that God is time, or at least that His spirit is.

I knew I wanted to act from a very young age - from about nine, really - but I didn't know how to go about it. I had no idea. The world was a much bigger place then.

I worry about global anti-Semitism - not just as a bad idea that originates from bad people, but also as something that arises as a challenge to global order.