Quotes About Originality

Well, so far, at least, my own ideas always take priority over those of other writers. As long as the well doesn't run dry, I imagine this will be the case.

The writers led by Mike Scully are fantastic. And they're creating original stories that not only don't repeat what we've already done, they also don't repeat anything I've seen on television.

My sensibility steers me toward writers who are out on their own.

I feel like a lyricist is somebody that writes their own lyrics. Now songwriters and lyricists are two totally different things. You can't really be a lyricist if you didn't write your lyrics. There's no passion, there's nothing in it coming from you. It's somebody else's feelings and you just taking it and running with it.

I do not believe in pure idioms. I think there is naturally a desire, for whoever speaks or writes, to sign in an idiomatic, irreplaceable manner.

I just admire people like Woody Allen, who every year writes an original screenplay. It's astonishing. I always wished that I could do that.

An author writes a book, and that's the book at that point. And if the author writes the book again, then somehow something has gone wrong, if you see what I mean.

The only thing that's authentic about what a writer writes is his work.

Writing is not a competitive sport. Everyone that writes has his or her own voice.

Just because someone may or may not have someone that writes some words for them doesn't mean that, A, they don't have to kill it on the performance, and, B, they don't have to have the ear for what's tight and what's not, which is something a lot of people don't have.

You don't want to become guilty of plagiarism by letting someone else's words get inadvertently mixed in with your own. If you do feel the need to paste in a block of research while you're writing, be sure to highlight the copied text in a different color so you can go back and remove or rewrite it entirely later.

It's like a novelist writing far out things. If it makes a point and makes sense, then people like to read that. But if it's off in left field and goes over the edge, you lose it. The same with musical talent, I think.

So when I started writing my own stuff, it was with a lot of combinations and time changes and power.

I'm not trying to reinvent the wheel. I'm just writing songs that I like, and that's where I've always come from.

Elvis Costello's song writing is so peerless and individualistic. It's storytelling and it's deeply intelligent and clever.

In no way am I demeaning writing or any other form of art because it's popular. What I'm saying is that anything fed into the industrial machinery to comply with rules of size and length and shelf-life has a hard time surviving as art.

If you want to be a singer, you've got to concentrate on it twenty-four hours a day. You can't be a well driller, too. You've got to concentrate on the business of entertaining and writing songs. Always think different from the next person. Don't ever do a song as you heard somebody else do it.

What good is it being a painter if you can't paint yourself?

Oh, if necessity is the mother of invention, who is the Father? Fantasy.

We won't make ourselves more creative and productive by copying other people's habits, even the habits of geniuses; we must know our own nature, and what habits serve us best.

There's no magic formula—not for ourselves, and not for the people around us. We won't make ourselves more creative and productive by copying other people's habits, even the habits of geniuses; we must know our own nature, and what habits serve us best.

Pouring out ideas is better for creativity than doling them out by the teaspoon.

When man resolved to imitate walking, he invented the wheel, which does not look like a leg. In doing this, he was practicing surrealism without knowing it.

Be regular and orderly in your life like a bourgeois, so that you may be violent and original in your work.