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1) "The thesis of this book is that there are many blocks to creativity, but there are active steps we can take to protect the creative process. In the coming pages, I will discuss many of the steps we follow at Pixar, but the most compelling mechanisms to me are those that deal with uncertainty, instability, lack of candor, and the things we cannot see. I believe the best managers acknowledge and make room for what they do not know—not just because humility is a virtue but because until one adopts that mindset, the most striking breakthroughs cannot occur. I believe that managers must loosen the controls, not tighten them. They must accept risk; they must trust the people they work with and strive to clear the path for them; and always, they must pay attention to and engage with anything that creates fear. Moreover, successful leaders embrace the reality that their models may be wrong or incomplete. Only when we admit what we don't know can we ever hope to learn it."

2) "Not only did I often sleep on the floor of the computer rooms to maximize time on the computer, but so did many of my fellow graduate students. We were young, driven by the sense that we were inventing the field from scratch—and that was exciting beyond words. For the first time, I saw a way to simultaneously create art and develop a technical understanding of how to create a new kind of imagery. Making pictures with a computer spoke to both sides of my brain. To be sure, the pictures that could be rendered on a computer were very crude in 1969, but the act of inventing new algorithms and seeing better pictures as a result was thrilling to me."

3) "Pixar could not have survived without Steve, but more than once in those years, I wasn't sure if we'd survive with him. Steve could be brilliant and inspirational, capable of diving deeply and intelligently into any problem we faced. But he could also be impossible: dismissive, condescending, threatening, even bullying. Perhaps of most concern, from a management standpoint, was the fact that he exhibited so little empathy. At that point in his life, he was simply unable to put himself in other people's shoes, and his sense of humor was nonexistent. At Pixar, we have always had a pretty deep bench of jokesters and a core belief in having fun, but everything we tried with Steve fell painfully flat. Known for holding forth in meetings to the exclusion of all others, he once briefed a group of us who were about to go into a session with Disney execs by stressing how important it was that we 'listen and not talk.' The irony was so obvious, I couldn't resist saying: 'Okay, Steve, I'll try to restrain myself.' Everyone in the room laughed, but he didn't crack a smile."

4) "Getting the team right is the necessary precursor to getting the ideas right. It is easy to say you want talented people, and you do, but the way those people interact with one another is the real key. Even the smartest people can form an ineffective team if they are mismatched. That means it is better to focus on how a team is performing, not on the talents of the individuals within it. A good team is made up of people who complement each other. There is an important principle here that may seem obvious, yet in my experience is not obvious at all. Getting the right people and the right chemistry is more important than getting the right idea."

5) "Naturally, every director would prefer to be told that his film is a masterpiece. But because of the way the Braintrust is structured, the pain of being told that flaws are apparent or revisions are needed is minimized. Rarely does a director get defensive, because no one is pulling rank or telling the filmmaker what to do. The film itself—not the filmmaker—is under the microscope. This principle eludes most people, but it is critical: You are not your idea, and if you identify too closely with your ideas, you will take offense when they are challenged. To set up a healthy feedback system, you must remove power dynamics from the equation—you must enable yourself, in other words, to focus on the problem, not the person."

6) "When filmmakers, industrial designers, software designers, or people in any other creative profession merely cut up and reassemble what has come before, it gives the illusion of creativity, but it is craft without art. Craft is what we are expected to know; art is the unexpected use of our craft."

7) "Managers of creative companies must never forget to ask themselves: 'How do we tap the brainpower of our people?' From its genesis to its execution, from the goodwill it engendered to the company-wide changes it set in motion, Notes Day was a success in part because it was based on the idea that fixing things is an ongoing, incremental process. Creative people must accept that challenges never cease, failure can't be avoided, and 'vision' is often an illusion. But they must also feel safe—always—to speak their minds. Notes Day was a reminder that collaboration, determination, and candor never fail to lift us up."

1) "All around them, the partygoers were partaking of the food on the tables, the servants ably refilling any plates that were in danger of emptying. The punch bowl remained three-quarters full no matter how much of it was imbibed—and, it seemed, old Garth Duke was determined to imbibe most of it himself."

2) "Once, Malcolm Kelerchian was the finest investigator in the Tarsonis Police Force's Detective Squad. But the TPF didn't keep good investigators for very long—they were often snapped up by the military or the government, deemed far too useful to be wasted on mere local policing. That was a pity, as far as Mal was concerned. He liked being a detective. His clearance rate was three times that of any other detective in the squad. Admittedly, this wasn't a difficult feat to accomplish. The TPF was primarily made up of thugs and bruisers who mostly just made sure that the interests of the rich were protected."

3) "Like everyone else, Markus started out as a runner for the local dealer. In his case, it was Orphy Jones, back when he ran Pyke Lane. By the time Markus worked his way up to being a barker, Orphy got his head blown off by a rival dealer, the guy everyone called Grin, on account of how he didn't never smile. Grin's main lieutenant was a fast-loader named Jules. Wasn't long before Markus saw the words on the screen: Jules was the brains. Grin was just muscle, and wasn't much longer before a bullet from Jules's T20—this was before the P220s came out—was in Grin's skull and Jules started callin' himself 'Fagin' for some reason and started taking territory."

4) "Mal was suddenly startled by the beeping of his earpiece, with his computer informing him that it was Officer Fonseca. 'Excuse me, ma'am, I need to take this.' Without waiting for Killiany to acknowledge this, he said, 'Go ahead, Larry.' 'I got somethin'—probably shoulda brought it to you sooner, but I figured it was crap like most—' Mal didn't have the patience for this—not today. 'Spit it out, Larry.' 'Big talk on the street these days is someone workin' with Fagin—calls herself the Blonde. Some kinda enforcer.' 'Fagin?' The name didn't ring any bells with Mal. 'Who's that?' 'You don't know who Fagin is?' Larry sounded incredulous. 'He runs everything down here.' Mal couldn't believe what he was hearing. 'What do you mean?' 'He runs all the crap down here: the drugs, the protecton rackets, the booze—it all flows through Fagin. I thought you knew that, Mal—how the flick could you not know that?'"

5) Larry shook his head. 'Dammit, Mal, you used to be a good cop. A good cop knows his territory.' In a weak voice, and knowing it was foggy as the words came out of his mouth, Mal said, 'I never worked the Gutter.' 'Then you shoulda learned. Dammit, Mal, you used to be good police, and good police know how to work a neighborhood. Here's a clue: You don't do it by talkin' to people with a big sign on your flickin' forehead that says you're a confed.'"

1) "A Fred alien, and everybody else except a human, can never die. Even when you shoot his body to Swiss cheese, so his blue guts and red blood dribble out the holes onto the deck, his consciousness remains intact. Blow his head apart, and it floats as a ghost, drifting like invisible smoke—still thinking, hearing and seeing, feeling and desperately dreaming. You can talk to them; they actually hear you. The Freds and other races pile their dead in fantastic cenotaph theaters where they are entertained day and night by elaborate operas and dances of great beauty, all to keep the 'dead' vibrant and interested until such time as they're needed for revivification—assuming there's enough left of the body and enough interest on the part of an animate Fred to pay for it. I'd shot the captain nine days ago as he lay on the floor, reaching up to implement and lock in the preprogrammed course for Fredworld. Despite the best efforts of me and Arlene and our contractor-advisors Sears and Roebuck—a Klave binary pair who each looked like a cross between Magilla Gorilla and Alley Oop—we couldn't figure out how to change course or even shut off the engines."

2) "Jesus, I felt homesick. Just a few months ago—my time—I was wasting my life at Camp Pendleton, loafing and pulling the occasional watch, thinking of not reupping and dropping back into the world instead. I had a fiancee, now deceased; I had parents and high-school friends; I had the expectation that the world would look pretty much the same twenty years later. Then we got sent to Kefiristan, but even that was all right; it was crap, but it was the crap I'd always known was possible in my chosen profession. But when they yanked us out of the Pearl Triangle and boosted Fox Company up to Phobos... well, they yanked me out of my comfortable reality and threw me into primordial chaos. So now I was jogging the length and circumference of an alien spaceship, hurling toward an unknown star at nearly lightspeed, with a plural alien as ally and a mutable thing for a guide; the only constancy was Arlene Sanders, now my last and only friend."

3) "'Christ, S and R—do something!' Having issued my first military command in a week, I did what any good military man does when confronted with an invisible enemy: I ran in circles, screaming and shouting. Sears and Roebuck looked frustrated, being constitutionally unable to follow the order 'do something.' Then Arlene, whirling rapidly in every direction with her magazine-fed shotgun, thought of the obvious: 'Fly! Isn't this stupid Fred ship steered by consensus?' 'Yes! I don't know what that means!'"

4) "Then the overcaptain's face softened. 'Actually studied first mission in school; strange to meet legends in flesh.' 'You read about it?' I asked. 'There's a book?' 'Two books. Many books, but two originals: Knee-Deep in the Dead and Hell on Earth. Woman named Lovelace Jill wrote them, said was on mission with you.'"

5) "I came to the room with the sabotaged radio and the incinerated map. No matter—the floor plan of the facility was burned into my brain, either by the sheer horror of the memory or else by the Resuscitators when they resurrected me here. Didn't need the map, in any event, and the radios were useless inside the RAM of an alien computer. I felt like I'd been drafted into a computer game, jerked by electronic strings like a meat puppet."

6) "The brain is a gifted storyteller. 'We are all greater artists than we realize,' or whatever the hell that guy said, whoever the hell he was."

7) "'You're a product of genetic engineering, created by a race of creatures we call the Freds, who have heads like an artichoke, if you know what that is—covered with colored leaves—and grow taller and smaller as part of their mating cycle. You've seen them, right? Is my description right on, or what?' 'Sssssspeak!' demanded the spiney, but it closed its mouth, swallowing the rest of its spittle. I took that as a good sign. 'You know they're members of a grand galaxy-wide conspiracy of philosophical-literary criticism that is reasonably well-translated into English as the Deconstructionists. They're fighting the other school, called the Hyper-realists. You were sent here to prepare us for invasion and conquest by the Freds, and they told you that we would roll over and beg for mercy if you came looking like our ancient demons, right?'"

8) "Above us was sky, horribly enough; we had come down more than two kilometers through the solid rock of Phobos... and here, at the bottom, directly overhead we saw the stars! It made no geographic sense, but, of course, it didn't have to—it was nothing but computer software, after all."

9) "I shrugged. I know when I'm beat. 'So long, boys, can't say it's always been a treat, but it's been real.' Even Arlene turned her attention away from her true love's final resting place to smile in farewell. 'Don't take any wooden Fredpills,' she said, thoroughly confusing the Klave. 'Has been it a slice,' said the pair of Magilla Gorillas. Without another word, they turned left and strode off, marching in unison, subvocalizing all the way to each other. They disappeared around a tall ancient-looking column that supported a statue of what looked like Brigham Young, and we never saw Sears and Roebuck again."

10) "The End...?"

1) "What could be more dangerous than when I was almost crushed like a bug when I helped save Ken from the spider-mind and the steam demon on the train? Or when I was driving the truck and the two missiles from the bony almost got me? (Poor Dr. Ackerman called those things revenants. Boy, he sure came up with some weird names. He said all the creatures were like monsters from the id. I wonder what he meant.)"

2) "My parents took me to a horror film when I was only six, one of the dozens of movies about the Aztec mummy. The monster didn’t really frighten me; but the sight of young maidens being sacrificed by evil priests gave me nightmares for a week. Their idol looked like Moloch. As I grew older, I began seeking out the image of Moloch. I found it in the old silent German movie, Metropolis, and it showed up in a frightening picture about devil worship. But I’ll never forget how effectively it was used in the movie they used to make the transition from the old series, Star Trek Ten, to the new one, Star Trek: Exodus."

3) "ALBERT GALLATIN: I like being here. SANDERS: Albert? You don’t feel you’ve been sacrificed to Moloch? GALLATIN: The opposite. This is wonderful. It’s better than sex. SANDERS: Well, I’ll grant you it’s up there. HIDALGO: What do you think about that, Sergeant Taggart? TAGGART: About what, sir? HIDALGO: Do you think this disembodied condition is better than sex? TAGGART: Nothing is better than a clearly delineated chain of command, sir!"

4) "'How did it begin?' asked Arlene, suddenly as enthusiastic as Albert. 'You call them books,' said S&R. 'The Holy Tests.' 'Texts,' I did it again, almost unconsciously. 'Texts,' they said. I felt like giving them an A-plus. 'Books are twelve million years old. The Freds disagree with us.' 'With the Klave?' I asked. 'All of us. Not only Klave-us, but all that are here us. We bring you for going to the war.' 'Literary criticism,' marveled Arlene. I wasn’t about to forget that she’d been an English major for a while. Albert clapped like a little kid who’d just been given the present he always wanted—understanding. 'The two sides are literary critics, conquering stellar systems to promote their own school of criticism. I love it. It’s too insane not to love. What is their primary disagreement over the twelve-million-year-old books?' S&R gave us one of their best sentences: 'The Freds want to take the books apart.' Arlene screamed, but it was a happy kind of scream. 'Oh, my God,' she said, 'they’re deconstructionists!'"

5) "I shouldered the burden of command. Sergeant Taggart had a plan. 'Let’s go!' covered both my strategy and my tactics."

1) "Comes a time when you have to say the hell with it, if only for a moment. Arlene and I had recently faced the worst thing anyone can face, worse than the monsters or dying in space. We knew what it meant to lose your sanity... and come back to yourself again. Arlene started whistling 'Molly Malone.' She'd picked one of the few songs to which I knew the words. I sang along. All that was missing was a bottle of Tullamore Dew, the world's finest sipping whiskey. As it was, our duet seemed to transform the lengthening shadows of dusk in Utah into the cool glades of Ireland. I wondered if doom had come there. Were there demons in Dublin?"

2) "'In space,' she said finally, 'on Phobos, we found a giant swastika.' She let her observation hang in the air, waiting for the Mormon to respond. 'What do you think it means?' he asked. Arlene sighed. 'I don't know; except it's a reason for me to hate them more.' 'I would hate them just as much,' said Albert, 'if you had found the cross up there, or the flag of the United States, which I believe was also inspired by God. A symbol used by aliens means nothing to me. We know them by their fruits.' 'Oh, fug,' said Jill. 'This is like being back in class. Don't give me a test, Albert.'"

3) "The next town along the line was Buckeye. We ditched the truck cab, then waited for night. We found an alley and enjoyed the busy sounds of night life in this modern world: troop trucks every few minutes, the tramping of little zombie feet, screams of pain, howled orders from hell-princes, and the occasional earthshaking tread of steam-demons. Even more soothing to our shattered nerves were mechanical sounds that reminded me of the spidermind, evidently a smaller model. I wondered if this one got better mileage. 'Have you noticed an odd thing?' whispered Arlene. 'You mean besides everything?' I replied."

3) "Inside the main part of the store, the fluorescent lights were on and burning steady. But the refrigeration was off, and there was a rotten smell of all kinds of produce, milk, and meat that had been let go before its time. 'Ew,' said my Mormon buddy, and he hit the center of the bull's-eye. The meat smelled a lot worse than the bad vegetable matter. And oh, that fish! If I hadn't been wide awake on adrenaline—compared to which caffeine is harmless kid stuff—I would never have believed what I saw next. Nothing on Phobos or Deimos had the feeling of a fever dream compared to the spectacle of... 'Hell in the aisles,' breathed Albert. The grocery store was as busy as a Saturday afternoon in the good old world. Mom and Dad and the kids were there. Young lovers wandered the aisles. Middle-class guys with middle-sized guts in ugly T-shirts pushed shopping carts down the center aisle with no regard for who got in the way. Nothing had changed from the way it used to be... except that everyone was dead. [...] They didn't eat any of the groceries. They seemed caught up in the behavior of the past, as if the program had been so hard-wired into their skulls that not even losing their souls could erase the ritual of going to the grocery store."

4) "'Don't worry about me,' Jill said, following my example and kicking the corpse. 'They're just bags of blood, and we've got the pins. It's no big thing.' No one was joking now. Arlene looked at me with a worried expression. This was no time to psycho-analyze a fourteen-year-old who was doing her best to feel nothing. This sort of cold attitude was par for the course in an adult, a mood that would be turned off (hopefully) in peacetime; but hearing it from a kid was unnerving. The words just out of her lips were the cold truth we created. Do only the youngest soldiers develop the attitude necessary to win a war? Until this moment, I wouldn't have thought of Arlene and myself as old-fashioned sentimentalists; but if the future human race became cold and machine-like to fight the monsters, then maybe the monsters win, regardless of the outcome."

5) "'As I said, his name's Ken Estes. He's a computer software designer slumming as a CIA analyst. Low-level stuff, not a field agent or anything. He was born in—' 'No time for the family background,' I interrupted. 'Keep him focused on how and why he became a cybermummy.' Somewhere, water was dripping. I hadn't noticed it before, but it was very annoying while waiting for Jill to pass on the messages in silence. Finally, she spoke again: 'When the aliens landed and started the war, Ken was told by his superiors that the agency had developed a new computer which the operator accessed in V.R. mode.' 'What's V.R.?' Albert asked. 'Old term; this guy's in his thirties! Virtual Reality; we call it burfing now, from 'body surfing,' I think.' 'Oh, the net,' said Albert."

6) "We took Sig-Cows off'n the first two zombies we killed; better than the pistols, even though they were still just 10mm. The next one had a beautiful, wonderful shotgun. I'd take it, even if it was a fascist pump-action."