Quotes About Originality

I just feel like TV takes more risks than film. Film has gotten very safe: it's very compartmentalized about what type of things will be successful. And whereas in TV, since all these new platforms opened, they're saying to writers, go out there, write the most different show that you can write. Write something that's really original and different.

People constantly describe me as a formalist or even a minimalist, but I'm not really bothered with the rules of painting or the history of painting. My approach is that everything is mine. I take what I can use from wherever, and then I forget where I've taken it from. But there is no point me making anything that looks like anyone else's.

It's easy to get lost in the shuffle, and just enticing people to hear the music for free doesn't mean that much when everyone else is essentially doing the same thing on MySpace, or wherever.

Great songs stand out wherever they're from.

At a certain point, to remain slightly tangential to wherever I was became a way of 'being Tony': by not being anything that everyone else was.

I avoid preset sounds wherever possible, and all the sounds I use I have edited.

Think of the imagination as a giant stone from which we carve out new ideas. As we chip away, our new ideas become more polished and refined. But if you start by editing your imagination, you start with a tiny stone.

I find that the very things that I get criticized for, which is usually being different and just doing my own thing and just being original, is the very thing that's making me successful.

If you're gonna make connections which are innovative... you have to not have the same bag of experiences as everyone else does.

I walk on untrodden ground. There is scarcely any part of my conduct which may not hereafter be drawn into precedent.

The very essence of the creative is its novelty, and hence we have no standard by which to judge it.

I never threw an illegal pitch. The trouble is, once in a while I toss one that ain't never been seen by this generation.

After a while, a joke, if you say it too much, just becomes contrived, or fake-sounding.

My vocal style I haven't tried to copy from anyone. It just developed until it became the girlish whine it is today.

I cannot sit back and think that I am the best. I have to prove again and again that I am the most original music director around, even if I'm everyone's favorite whipping boy.

If you can whistle the melody, then the song will stick. But if you need a bunch of machines to make it sound good, you're probably not writing anything that's going to last a long time.

I get that racism exists, but it's not a catalyst for my content. I don't need to talk about race to have material. My style of comedy is more self-deprecating. I think that makes me more relatable. When you deal with 'topics' - race, white versus black - you're not separating from the pack. You're doing what everybody else is doing.

I wouldn't mind, if Peter Parker had originally been black, a Latino, an Indian, or anything else, that he stay that way. But we originally made him white. I don't see any reason to change that.

I followed the footsteps of Scarface, Willie D, Bushwick Bill, Big Pokey, Lil Keke, Fat Pat, Big Moe, and Slim Thug. Those are the people who I was following behind, not the white rappers who came before me. No disrespect intended, I just didn't follow that lane, I followed this one.

The mistake British comedians often make is trying to beat the Americans at their own game - getting visiting American singers on their shows, talking about 'sidewalk' instead of 'pavement,' sitting on high stools in a white dinner jacket doing ballads. That way, you simply end up with a mid-Atlantic mishmash.

I believe in a kind of fidelity to your own early ideas; it's a kind of antagonism in me to prevailing fads.

There were no previews; we made the film we wanted to make.

Working with newbies has its own advantages as they're open to ideas and the audience can see the actresses as themselves, devoid of any pre-conceived image from their previous films.

I want to make every film different from my previous one.