Successful creative work is about bursts of ideas and also very much about brutal editing of the ideas—at every stage—so that the ideas that survive are simple, powerful, and make the point required of them.  I’ve written here about editing once before.

Yesterday I visited Portlligat, where Salvador Dali lived and worked in an amazingly beautiful house right on a little cove.  Here’s his 8-Track player 🙂

I found a quote there that struck me… it was about editing—-though he didn’t use this word.

This is what the Dali the surrealist (and very realist promoter, no?) said about his house/studio in Portlligat:

“It is where I learnt to become poor, to limit and file down my thoughts so that they would acquire the sharpness of an axe, where blood tasted of blood and honey of honey”