Quotes About Originality

I remember when first, Stripes, and then Animal House came out - which I was really proud of, even though it was kind of loose and quite raucous - there were imitative movies that were not quite as good.

You need to be different and stand out. You need to have a message. For me, it didn't come easily. The best advice I was ever given, though, is go away and write 100 songs. You need to find the music that's you.

I have Dalinian thought: the one thing the world will never have enough of is the outrageous.

Discovery is seeing what everybody else has seen, and thinking what nobody else has thought.

A society made up of individuals who were all capable of original thought would probably be unendurable.

Discovery consists of seeing what everybody has seen, and thinking what nobody has thought.

That rockabilly sound wasn't as simple as I thought it was.

If we steal thoughts from the moderns, it will be cried down as plagiarism; if from the ancients, it will be cried up as erudition.

That's my actual payment, the fact that I can actually make something that I actually enjoy and put on repeat, and it's not related to anything else or anyone else's thoughts and ideas, it all came from me; I just love that aspect of it.

If you want to think new thoughts that are different, then do what creative people do - get the problem reasonably clear and then refuse to look at any answers until you've thought the problem through carefully how you would do it, how you could slightly change the problem to be the correct one.

I want to write my own thoughts and make my own music. I need to experiment with my sound and style.

When you listen to my music, you're going to know that you're getting the real me, my real thoughts and feelings... I want people to be like, 'Oh, he's fresh out with his music for it to be this good.'

Think your own thoughts.

Determine to do some thinking for yourself. Don't live entirely upon the thoughts of others. Don't be an automaton.

I think most people don't like others who, without a voice of their own, emulate the other. I certainly don't want anybody just to pick up my thoughts and hand them back to me.

If your mind is at work, we're in danger of reproducing another cliche. If we can keep our minds out of it and our thoughts out of it, maybe we'll come up with something original.

If there are similarities, it's simply because the same thoughts that occurred to other people also occurred to me. I'd be astonished if anyone could come up with any truly original powers that were at all interesting any more.

Ideas and thoughts and creativity is more of who I am than football.

I'm very fond of this phrase: 'Collage is not a refuge for the compositionally disabled.' If you put together the pieces in a really powerful way, I think you'll let a thousand discrepancies bloom.

To have everything written for you... It's not really creating. That's why I think symphony drummers are so limited. They 're limited to exactly what was played a hundred years before them by a thousand other drummers.

The only pressure I feel is to write good books. And to not replicate the previous book. Whether you have a thousand readers or a million readers it doesn't change the pressure. I never feel tempted to give the reader what I think the reader wants.

When the 'greats of all-time' put out their first albums, it wasn't a thousand features on it. And I'm one of the greats in my eyes.

And she did not want him to think her quite mad, only a little unique, only containing within her just that measure of the unexpected sufficient to make her irreplaceable.

Being nuts is its own reward.