Quotes About Originality

Nothing I do is done by popular demand.

I can't do something just because it's popular.

You don't always have to be popular and do things everyone else is doing.

For the most part, I don't care about what everyone else is doing, or what is popular.

I've had people call me from bands that are very popular, and they're like, 'What do we do? We want to do what you do.' It's almost impossible to do what I do, because you would have to start in 1980. You can't just do it.

Having a set, popular formula does inhibit you.

There's a great difference between being popular and being an artist.

For instance, I'm always fascinated to see whether, given the kind of fairly known and established form called popular music, whether there is some magic combination that nobody has hit upon before.

I don't like it when people spout about the popular opinion just to make it louder.

Art has never been a popularity contest.

I want to portray myself as myself.

I never looked at it like I'm one of the most respected, but I always tried to stay to who I was. The way that I am in my music is the way that I am. I'm just not tryna portray nobody but Brad, period!

I'm just being P.J., that's the number one thing, I'm just being me. Like I'm not portraying something or acting or putting on something that I wouldn't put on every day in my life or doing anything that I wouldn't already be doing.

I'm not interested in people positioning me next to other artists.

Acting is very personal. I don't want to be like anybody else. There are positions I would like to be in - like Meryl Streep's, for instance.

Good fiction is about asserting the beauties of the world, inventing a new, positive thing. Where am I going to get that? And it should be original; it should not be cliched. So the way I looked at history was not to accuse it of failure.

When I came out with 'Posse on Broadway,' I decided, enough with trying to imitate New York, enough with trying to imitate L.A., let's just be Seattle. And rock, grunge, followed right after 'Posse on Broadway' and Seattle just exploded.

Most poets, like most people, try hard to be like someone they admire or they are possessed with an image of what they ought to be.

What have you given the world it never possessed before you came?

Creativity requires novelty. Imagination is all about counterfactuals and untested possibilities that don't yet exist.

If you hear Thelonious Monk play a run that goes from the top of the piano, OK, he has opened up the Grand Canyon with that. He's the river that's carved this entire space that we call the Grand Canyon. He does that with one run. He lets you know, like, what the possibility of the sound of the piano can do.

When the script of 'Nine' came along, I saw that there's a possibility of making something that is genuinely new and entertaining at the same time.

It is always possible to create something original.

Being yourself is one of the greatest things you can possibly do. Being true to yourself.