Quotes About Originality

The only permanent rule in Calvinball is that you can never play it the same way twice! (Calvin)

Van Gogh would've sold more than one painting if he'd put tigers in them.

Imagination is not always appreciated.

You can't copy anybody and end with anything. If you copy, it means you're working without any real feeling. No two people on earth are alike, and it's got to be that way in music or it isn't music.

If I'm going to sing like someone else, then I don't need to sing at all.

Everyones got to be different. You can't copy anybody and end up with anything. If you copy, it means you're working without any real feeling. And without feeling, whatever you do amounts to nothing.

Everyone's got to be different. You can't copy anybody and end up with anything. If you copy, it means you're working without any real feeling. And without feeling, whatever you do amounts to nothing. No two people on earth are alike, and it's got to be that way in music or it isn't music.

I feel like I'm always fighting not to repeat myself.

The greater intellect one has, the more originality one finds in men. Ordinary persons find no difference between men. 8

They would do better to say: Our book, Our commentary, Our history, etc., because there is in them usually more of other people's than their own.

Let no one say that I have said nothing new; the arrangement of the material is new. In playing tennis both players use the same ball, but one plays it better. I would just as soon be told that I have used old words. As if the same thoughts did not form a different argument by being differently arranged, just as the same words make different thoughts when arranged differently!

Let it not be said that I have said nothing new. The arrangement of the material is new.

Che non si dica che non ho detto niente di nuovo: la disposizione delle materie è nuova.

I didn't come out of a cereal box.

I just don't hear anyone else making the music I'm making in my head, so I'll have to do it myself.

If I wanted to be a painter, I might think about trying to be like Van Gogh, or if I was an actor, act like Laurence Olivier. If I was an architect, there's Frank Gehry. But you can't just copy somebody. If you like someone's work, the important thing is to be exposed to everything that person has been exposed to.

The world don't need any more songs... As a matter of fact, if nobody wrote any songs from this day on, the world ain't gonna suffer for it... There's enough songs for people to listen to, if they want to listen to songs. For every man, woman and child on earth, they could be sent, probably, each of them, a hundred songs, and never be repeated... Unless someone's gonna come along with a pure heart and has something to say. That's a different story.

A song is anything that can walk by itself.

Sometimes that's all it takes, the kind of recognition that comes when you're doing the thing for the thing's sake and you're on to something—it's just that nobody recognizes it yet.

We allow no geniuses around our Studio.

Whatever does not pretend at all has style enough.

Only the familiar transformed by genius is truly great.

I have never understood those dreams of a completely original form of expression. The most extraordinary discoveries are made when the artist is overwhelmed by what he has to say. Then he uses the old language in his urgency and the old language is translated from within.

I will blaze my own trail.