“To do, is to be.”
~ Socrates

“To be, is to do.”
~ Aristotole

“Art is making something out of nothing and selling it”.
~ Frank Zappa

“Every artist was first an amateur”
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

“To live a creative life we must lose our fear of being wrong.”
~ Joseph Chilton Pearce

“Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes.
Art is knowing which ones to keep.”
~ Scott Adams, The Dilbert Principle

“Do not let what you cannot do interfere with what you can do.”
~ John Wooden

“Don’t worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you’ll have to ram them down people’s throats.”
~ Howard Aiken

“He who stops being better stops being good.”
~ Oliver Cromwell

“Minds are like parachutes – they only function when open.”
~ Thomas Dewar

“Success is just a matter of attitude.”
~ Darcy E. Gibbons

“Democratic Design. Design with no price tag has no meaning. Good design. Smart solutions. Low prices.”
~ IKEA

“Writers write. Writing is a process. You don’t know what your writing will be like until the end of the process. If writing is your practice, the only way to fail is not to write.”
~ Gail Sher

“No Is Negative. Erase It From Your Agency’s Vocabulary.”
~ Bart Cleveland

“Relinquish your need for external approval. You alone are the judge of your worth.”
~ Deepak Chopra

“Replace fear-motivated behavior with love-motivated behavior.”
~ Deepak Chopra

“Identify your problems but give your power and energy to solutions.”
~ Tony Robbins

From an email to a friend about creative work …

Friend: “I think it turned out kinda nice, but there is nothing but stoney silence coming from him…so i guess that sucks.”

Me: “I’ve been reading alot, lately, to ‘raise my creative game’ and one thing that I read is analyze the movie (your work) when you’re done. If later, you find out it sucks, re-edit it. The best minds make the best failures so they say. Fail and fail again, if necessary.

… As a trumpeter you might appreciate this. when Miles Davis was young (circa 20s) he dropped out of Julliard and played with some heavy-hitters in the jazz world —the likes of Charlie Parker and others, of course. As i remember it (from his auto-biography), he made a mistake in a song once, completely noticeable at least to the band members. The band leader, Parker told him to play the [messed] up note again—and get used to it. [Because] jazz’s existence is based on “changing the thing” (i’m paraphrasing). As far i know this your first movie. you’re not Michael Moore, you’re [you] so do your thing and don’t apologize.”