Quotes About Originality

When Jack Black and I started Tenacious D, there were about two seconds in the beginning when we thought maybe we'd have a go at serious music. But we quickly abandoned that when we realized that everything we did tended to come out funny.

When you do anything completely different from a beaten path, many tend to pounce on you.

Most of the things I write, I write on spec. And because I write them on spec, there's less interference. Because there's less interference, they tend to be better.

In films, we tend to come up with something new all the time. Challenges and experiments are new at every stage.

I tend to like things that already exist.

On the whole, I tend not to listen to my peers.

If one artist sells five million albums, the tendency is for other artists to say, 'Maybe I should do a little of that, too.' That can be tough to resist.

The educator should do anything but advise the child to do what everybody does. He should rather rejoice when he sees in the child tendencies to deviation.

When you are successful, there is this tendency to repeat the elements that we believe have worked in a certain film. Then it becomes formulaic, and there is no getting back.

Humor has the tendency to be funny once. If I tell you a joke, we're going to have a big laugh. But the second time I tell the joke, it's going to be a bit strange, and the third time you're going to ask if there's something wrong with me. So I am very cautious with jokes, but there is a lightness in my work.

TV tends to try and fit everyone into a TV mold.

Fantasy gets a mixed reception - a lot of fantasy is formulaic but most of the award-winning fantasy on the contrary tends to be the stuff at the edges of the genre, rather than swimming in the middle.

One of my pet peeves about Nashville is that it tends to be copycatted. I don't want to do that. I've got to be different.

I just wanted to play tennis. I started because I wanted to pick up another sport and then as I was slowly getting better I wanted to see how far I can go but I always wanted to be myself. I wanted to be original. I didn't want to copy anybody's style.

Some people say there was no jazz tenor before me. All I know is I just had a way of playing and I didn't think in terms of any other instrument but the tenor.

When I make films, I don't think of any other directors or their work in terms of the rhythm of the editing or the tenor of the performances.

I am not here to beat anyone. I am here to make a name for myself, and I am glad to work with great directors. I don't believe in the term 'next superstar.'

We reserve the term 'genius' for people who are creative, who are innovators, who think in ways that are entirely new. In the Middle Ages, the term 'genius' was reserved for people with the best memories. That is telling.

I get very frustrated by this term 'genre exercise.' I mean, what exactly is that? Genre is not really relevant when you are writing a song; hopefully you are doing it to explore something, to create something, and I don't agree that any of my albums are genre exercises.

Style is a form of expression! It's what makes your character your character, to put it in laymen's term.

You want to stand out and be unique and do something different. I always try to zig when they zag - I guess it's a football term, but it applies to a lot of different areas of life.

People should think things out fresh and not just accept conventional terms and the conventional way of doing things.

I embraced being a pop artist, but I like doing it on my own terms, at my own pace.

In terms of my actual acting, I don't really like to to copy anyone or replicate anything that I've seen.