Quotes About Originality

Just by nature, we're always filled with so many ideas and want to cram as many ideas into a song as we can, and I think that gave us a lot of our signature sound.

When you are pursuing art, it is critical to develop something signature. There are plenty of people who are followers, but it is absolutely necessary to have something that sets you apart.

I really am in love with the idea of an artistic signature.

When I was shopping around trying to get signed, I made it a point to say, 'This is who I am.' I dress the way I normally dress, and I just wanted to find a label that would accept me for that.

I counterfeited Mark Kostabi's artworks. During the eighties, Mark didn't paint his own paintings. Instead, he had other artists painting them, and he just added his signature. So what I did was to use some of the same painters, and signed his name myself.

That's the funny thing - if there was a year and half or two years of us being a band like every other band and then getting signed, we would probably have made 'Pretty. Odd.' as our first album instead.

I had watched 'What Lies Beneath' long before I signed 'Raaz.' It was similar in terms of the story premise and the infidelity part. But I didn't have to go and watch the other film. Once I read the script I wanted to bring my own perspective. I didn't want to copy from a Hollywood film.

To the real artist in humanity, what are called bad manners are often the most picturesque and significant of all.

The importance of an artist is bringing new signs into a language.

Anyone can write a story based on the kind of horror where you see a guy in car and then there's the bad guy in the back seat. It's infantile to rely on that for telling a story. That's like going to bed and thinking there's a monster under your bed. It's silly.

Anything that was perverse and silly would be Kids in the Hall.

A lot of the stuff that I want to create personally is usually pretty absurd or silly comedy stuff.

What Paul and I do is not fashionable - it's a load of silly characters mucking about.

In the beginning, it was meant to be like a faceless art piece. Then I did the first record and it received enough notice to satisfy my needs. I questioned the procedure out of fear. The Silver Jews was never meant to be recreated live.

You need to be naive enough to do things differently. No big publishing house would have allowed us to co-create a fully designed, four color business book in landscape format - because it was contrary to the publishing industry logic. However, we thought of Business Model Generation as a product, not just a book - similar to Apple products.

Even if I play a similar role to one I've played before, I will never play it the same, I'll always try to do something different with it.

Einstein was a great advocate of the notion that good ideas look absurd at the beginning. Camus expressed a similar view.

I do not want to do a role which is similar to the previous one or the concept and the genre.

People complain about Hollywood movies being similar. That goes right down to the fundamental green light process, because the process involves having to compare it to three other movies.

I'm not Miley Cyrus. There may be some similarities, but I'm my own person.

I try hard not to repeat myself and not to do material other people are doing. We transcribe every other late-night show to make sure there's no similarity.

I feel that the simplicity of life is just being yourself.

'Pong' is simply a knockoff of the Odyssey Ping-Pong game.

Originality is simply a pair of fresh eyes.