Quotes About Originality

Being yourself is what will make you survive through anything. If you make music to please someone, it's the first step in the wrong direction. Always do what you believe in, no matter what people say. Only way to go!

Anyone who wants to be an entrepreneur like someone else is actually looking in the wrong direction. You don't look out for inspiration, you look in. You have to ask yourself how can I be better today, at solving the problem I am trying to solve for my company. I wouldn't encourage anyone to be like me. Just be like you.

Mainly, I don't like it when music is made solely to impress people or in order to please business people; it doesn't sound good to me. If you're making music in order to become famous or loved by the masses... that's not what I'm about. When somebody's making music for the wrong reasons, I hear it right away.

What I often do is just think of a completely obtuse thing to do, almost the wrong thing to do. That often works because you start a different approach, something no one has tried.

The studios don't seem to foster good writing. They're not so interested in that, but they're more interested in what worked most recently. They're definitely very serious about making money, and that's not a wrong thing, but you don't have to make money the same way all the time.

The one lesson I've learned from technology and food is the only time you know you're doing the wrong thing is when you're doing what everyone else is doing.

I'd say the key thing is to remain true to what originally got you into music. When I wrote 'Hallelujah,' it ignited me to do music because of the love and joy that I got from writing that song. Down the road, you get all of these opinions from people; just remember what got you started in the first place.

In sixth grade my teacher said that we had to do a talent show. You could sing or recite a poem... I went a wrote a little sketch for myself called 'Our Big World' about how many ways you could use a scarf.

I was criticized by some people for my first album because they said I was taking sacred music. They knew nothing about what I was doing. That was no sacred music; that's music I wrote.

I never wrote music for the mainstream.

I look out at the stadiums full of people and see them all knowing the words to songs I wrote. And curling their hair! I remember straightening my hair because I wanted to be like everybody else, and now the fact that anybody would emulate what I do? It's just funny. And wonderful.

I write all my own songs. Everything I did on 'The X Factor' was basically original, except for some of the live shows. Everything I did was original, and I wrote it from the heart.

Sometimes a line enters your head, and you're so grateful for it. You go online to check to see if anyone wrote it before you. You must have stolen it.

I like the guys who wrote their own stuff and were able to perform it, like Seth Rogen. He popped off so young. When he did 'The 40-Year-Old Virgin,' and he was a co-producer on the movie, I was like, 'Oh my God: that's exactly what I want to do.'

Ed Sheeran wrote his songs, so I wanted to write my own songs.

'Something More' is a song that I wrote not necessarily about country radio, more so about a lot of songs that were being pitched to me. I wrote that after song after song after song was just the same song, just a different melody, so I was just looking for something more to put on the record.

People are quite shocked when you remind them that Elvis Presley and Frank Sinatra never wrote a song that they recorded in their lives, as far as I know.

When we finally came to start work on this, the joy was it was only Joel and I, we didn't have to answer to anybody, and we didn't have to submit a screen play or anything like that. We just wrote it and then made it.

Like, I kind of developed my musical style in a vacuum. Even though I listen to a lot of stuff, the way I wrote was in my bedroom, really privately. It's still the way I write, actually.

I knew that collaborating on songwriting would be difficult for a lot of people, because I was known very much, for my independence and the fact that I wrote these quirky songs that were not typical structure, not typical sound - you know, really original stuff.

Any comparison to a WWE legend or someone I've looked up to is really cool, but make no mistake about it, my ego is too big to want to be a really good replica of someone else!

As a writer for six years, I wrote my own TV, which, I was the only person in the WWE that could probably honestly say, since day one in NXT, they wrote their own material.

WWE is all about doing things that have never been done.

Vince and WWE, they're not fresh. Yes, Vince does big business. They have the best talent in the world, but they have no fresh ideas. They should be selling out every arena.