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.
The first book is the book you have to write to get back at your parents; the book you always had in you. Once you get that out of your way, you can start writing books.
There is no doubt that creativity is the most important human resource of all. Without creativity, there would be no progress, and we would be forever repeating the same patterns.
I was in a taxi the other night, and we started talking about life and the taxi driver goes, 'Chaos and creativity go together. If you lose one per cent of your chaos, you lose your creativity.' I said that's the most brilliant thing I've heard. I needed to hear that years ago.
Every really good creative person in advertising has always had two noticeable characteristics. First, there was no subject he could not easily get interested in...Second, he was an extensive browser in all sorts of fields of information. For it is with the advertising man as with the cow: no browsing, no milk.
It is the lava of the imagination whose eruption prevents an earthquake.
As children, we all live in a world of imagination, of fantasy, and for some of us that world of make-believe continues into adulthood.
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