takshimada’s most recent Quotables

A man without a wife and babies is a menace to civilization. One bachelor is an irritation. Ten thousand bachelors are a war.

If you're at the cutting edge, then you're going to bleed.

We assume that technical problems can be solved only with technical expertise; the researcher most likely to find the answer is the one most familiar with the terms of the equation. But that assumption is wrong. The people deep inside a domain often suffer from a kind of mental handicap. As a result, the impossible problem stays impossible. It's not until the challenge is shared with motivated outsiders that the solution can be found.

Despite a lack of natural ability, I did have the one element necessary to all early creativity: naiveté. That fabulous quality that keeps you from knowing just how unsuited you are for what you are about to do.

Perfection is not very communicative. If you only worried about making a mistake, then you will have communicated nothing. You will have missed the point of making music, which is to make people feel something.

Creativity is the residue of time wasted.

The struggle of maturity is to recover the seriousness of a child at play.

No man is an island.

By its nature, the metropolis provides what otherwise could be given only by traveling; namely, the strange.

Knowledge can be a subtle curse. When we learn about the world, we also learn all the reasons the world cannot be changed. We get used to our imperfections. We become numb to the possibilities of something new. In fact, the only way to remain creative over time – to not be undone by our expertise – is to experiment with ignorance, to stare at things that we don't fully understand.

Technology inspires art, and art challenges the technology.

Not everyone can become a great artist, but a great artist can come from anywhere.

The moral is that outsider creativity isn't a state of life – it's a state of mind.

If you can keep finding challenges, then you can think like a young person even when you're old and dying. That idea gives me hope.

The only way to maximize group creativity – to make the whole more than the sum of its parts – is to encourage a candid discussion of mistakes. In part, this is because the acceptance of error reduces its cost. ... We can only get it right when we talk about what we might get wrong.

Innovative systems constantly veer toward the 'edge of chaos', to those environments that are neither fully predictable nor fully anarchic. We need structure or everything falls apart. But we also need spaces that surprise us. Because it is the change we don't expect, with the people we just met, that will change the way we think about everything.

[We] were really determined to create a kind of mutual admiration society, so that the techies thought the artists were geniuses, and the artists thought the techies were magicians. We wanted people to want to learn from each other. That's always when the best stuff happens: when someone tells you something you didn't already know.

The thing about ideas is that they naturally inspire new ones. This is why places that facilitate idea sharing tend to become more productive and innovative than those that don't. Because when ideas are shared, the possibilities do not add up. They multiply.

While the internet has evolved primarily to maximize efficiency and make it as easy as possible to find information, it needs to do a better job at increasing serendipity. Sometimes the most important idea is the one we don't even know we need.

Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.