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Daily Inspiration Quote by Sue Grafton

"Ideas are easy. It's the execution of ideas that really separates the sheep from the goats"

About this Quote

Grafton’s line lands like a polite insult: if you’re still bragging about your “great idea,” you’re probably one of the sheep. The sentence is built to puncture a familiar fantasy in creative culture - that originality is the scarce commodity and everyone else is just too unimaginative to keep up. She flips that scarcity. Ideas are “easy,” almost cheap; execution is where the real hierarchy asserts itself.

The subtext is about labor, not inspiration. “Execution” carries the weight of craft and repetition: drafting, revising, cutting, returning to the page when the thrill is gone. As a novelist who produced the Alphabet series with clockwork regularity, Grafton isn’t theorizing from a mountaintop. She’s describing the gritty advantage of professionals: they finish. They ship. They tolerate the boring middle where most would rather chase a new premise than solve the hard problems of structure, voice, and momentum.

“Separates the sheep from the goats” adds a moral edge. It’s an old biblical idiom, but in her mouth it becomes a blunt sorting mechanism for the creative economy: talkers versus doers, aspirants versus practitioners. The phrase also hints at how execution is socially legible in a way ideas aren’t. Anyone can claim they had the concept first; only the completed work proves competence. In an era that rewards pitching, branding, and announcing projects, Grafton’s intent is corrective - a reminder that the only idea that matters is the one you can turn into a real, functioning thing.

Quote Details

TopicWork Ethic
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Citation Formats

APA Style (7th ed.)
Grafton, Sue. (2026, January 17). Ideas are easy. It's the execution of ideas that really separates the sheep from the goats. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/ideas-are-easy-its-the-execution-of-ideas-that-82197/

Chicago Style
Grafton, Sue. "Ideas are easy. It's the execution of ideas that really separates the sheep from the goats." FixQuotes. January 17, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/ideas-are-easy-its-the-execution-of-ideas-that-82197/.

MLA Style (9th ed.)
"Ideas are easy. It's the execution of ideas that really separates the sheep from the goats." FixQuotes, 17 Jan. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/ideas-are-easy-its-the-execution-of-ideas-that-82197/. Accessed 8 Feb. 2026.

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About the Author

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Sue Grafton (April 24, 1940 - December 28, 2017) was a Novelist from USA.

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