Adam Savage > Quotes

“I reject your reality and substitute my own.”
― Adam Savage

“The difference between screwing around and science is writing it down.”
― Adam Savage

“When in doubt, C-4.”
― Adam Savage

“Failure is always an option”
― Adam Savage

“Gravity. It's not just a good idea; it's the law!”
― Adam Savage

“Jack of all trades, master of none, though often better than a master of one.”
― Adam Savage

“Am I missing an eyebrow?”
― Adam Savage

“I believe that rules do not make us moral; loving each other makes us moral.”
― Adam Savage

“sticks and stones can only break bones; but words can shatter the soul”
― Adam Savage

“It doesn’t matter if you’re a model maker, a potter, a dancer, a programmer, a writer, a political activist, a teacher, a musician, a milliner, whatever. It’s all the same. Making is making, and none of it is failure.”
― Adam Savage, Every Tool's A Hammer: Life Is What You Make It

“I love lists. Always have. when I was 14, I wrote down every dirty word I knew on file cards and placed them in alphabetical order. I have a thing about about collections, and a list is a collection with purchase. (Wired Magazine, "Step One: Make a List", October 2012)”
― Adam Savage

“Bad spellers of the world untie!”
― Adam Savage

“My workplace is wherever I'm making something, which could be in a field in gold country, or in an abandoned warehouse on a military base.”
― Adam Savage

“When we say we need to teach kids how to “fail,” we aren’t really telling the full truth. What we mean when we say that is simply that creation is iteration and that we need to give ourselves the room to try things that might not work in the pursuit of something that will.”
― Adam Savage, Every Tool's a Hammer: Life Is What You Make It

“I have concluded through careful empirical analysis and much thought that somebody is looking out for me, keeping track of what I think about things, forgiving me when I do less than I ought. Giving me strength to shoot for more than I think I’m capable of. I believe they know everything that I do and think, and they still love me, and I’ve concluded, after careful consideration, that this person keeping score is me.”
― Adam Savage

“Greg Broadmore's fertile and twisted imagination has conjoined multiple genres, memories, and a sharp sense of pulp, colonialist nostalgia/parody in this lavish, fully realized, imaginative tour-de-force. It's Jules Verne meets Fritz Lang meets Tintin.
It's beyond Steampunk. It's clearly an insatiable passion for the talismans of a bygone civilization and it's slavish addiction to the early industrial age in all it's filigreed, ignorant glory. Greg has raised the bar.”
― Adam Savage

“This is one of the main reasons I believe that adolescence can be so fraught for so many. Just as we start to catch the barest glimpses of our true selves and begin to understand what it is about the world that fascinates and intrigues us, we often run right into people who aren’t ready to be encouraging and can be downright hostile to someone being “different.”
― Adam Savage, Every Tool's a Hammer: Life Is What You Make It

“Now I love lists. I like long detailed lists. I like big unruly lists. I like sorting unsorted lists into outline form, then separating out their topics into lists of their own. Every single project I do involves the making of lists. I make them for organization, of course, but I also make them for assessment, for momentum as a stress reliever, and, counterintuitively, as a means to improve my creativity and free my thinking. There are daily lists, there are project lists. There are “things to order” lists. I make lists of pieces of research that I want together, lists of people I am collaborating with . . . . I make lists of things I need to purchase, things I need to find, and when all of those objects are going to get to me. And hopefully, finally, there are “homestretch” lists, that tell me I’m reaching the end.”
― Adam Savage, Every Tool's a Hammer: Life Is What You Make It

“Wrong turns are part of every journey. They are, as Kurt Vonnegut was fond of saying, “dancing lessons from God,” and the last thing we want to do is give our kids two left feet.”
― Adam Savage, Every Tool's a Hammer: Life Is What You Make It

“There is no skill in the world, I have since discovered, at which you get better the less sleep you have.”
― Adam Savage, Every Tool's a Hammer: Life Is What You Make It

“How is it possible to manage a group of dozens of artists to keep to a cohesive vision? At dinner that night I asked Guillermo how he did it. “You have to give everyone complete autonomy within a narrow bandwidth,” he replied. What he meant was that after you get their buy-in on the larger vision, you need to strictly define their roles in the fulfillment of that vision, and then you need to set them free to do their thing. You want the people helping you to be energized and involved; you want them contributing their creativity, not just following your orders. Giving them creative autonomy rewards their individual genius while keeping them oriented to the North Star of your larger shared vision.”
― Adam Savage, Every Tool's a Hammer: Life Is What You Make It

“The best part of making a list is, you guessed it, crossing things off.”
― Adam Savage, Every Tool's a Hammer: Life Is What You Make It

“Obsession is the gravity of making. It moves things, it binds them together, and gives them structure.”
― Adam Savage, Every Tool's a Hammer: Life Is What You Make It

“I began furiously making lists, and more lists, until I was making lists of lists . . . .”
― Adam Savage, Every Tool's a Hammer: Life Is What You Make It

“Self-doubt never leaves the attentive craftsperson, so you best make friends with it.”
― Adam Savage, Every Tool's a Hammer: Life Is What You Make It

“This is exactly the trap you don’t want to fall into when it comes to deadlines: you don’t want to cast them as the villain. What you want to do is embrace them, because at a certain point more time does not equal better output.”
― Adam Savage, Every Tool's a Hammer: Life Is What You Make It

“nothing we make ever turns out exactly as we imagined; that this is a feature not a bug; and that this is why we do any of it. The trip down any path of creation is not A to B. That would be so boring. Or even A to Z. That’s too predictable. It’s A to way beyond zebra. That’s where the interesting stuff happens. The stuff that confounds our expectations. The stuff that changes us.”
― Adam Savage, Every Tool's a Hammer: Life Is What You Make It

“Self-Reliance,” Ralph Waldo Emerson says: “To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men—that is genius.”
― Adam Savage, Every Tool's a Hammer: Life Is What You Make It

“Engaging with my environment opened my eyes to the never-ending flow of ideas. But there's even another way to find inspiration, on that I have leaned on more and more as I've gotten older and more experienced: DIGGING RIGHT THROUGH THE BOTTOM OF THE RABBIT HOLE, by which I mean, going as deep as humanly possible on something you care greatly about, something you can't stop thinking about.”
― Adam Savage, Every Tool's a Hammer: Life Is What You Make It

“Whenever we’re driven to reach out and create something from nothing, whether it’s something physical like a chair, or more temporal and ethereal, like a poem, we’re contributing something of ourselves to the world. We’re taking our experiences and filtering it through our words or our hands, or our voices or our bodies, and we’re putting something in the culture that didn’t exist before. In fact, we’re not putting what we make into the local culture, what we make IS the culture. Putting something in the world that didn’t exist before is the broadest definition of making, which means all of us can be makers. Creators.”
― Adam Savage, Every Tool's a Hammer: Life Is What You Make It