Quotes About Originality

I just try to keep myself a traditionalist. I liked being an underground comic doing my thing. I want to maintain that. I just do.

Novels are not about expressing yourself, they're about something beautiful, funny, clever and organic. Self-expression ? Go and ring a bell in a yard if you want to express yourself.

What doesn't feel okay to me, what feels a little bit out of balance, is when you want to turn yourself into something else - when you want to be another person.

What I'd like to be is a unique writer who's different from everybody else. I want to be a writer who tells stories unlike other writers'.

While I have not ruled out the possibility of doing music, what I don't want to do is go onstage and perform old songs. I do, all the time, but I don't think it is artistically brave.

I have to be very original and have a strong musical voice. I don't want to be a copycat of anybody.

I've kind of shut myself off to a lot of new music because I don't want to be influenced by it.

You have to be able to give the people what you want in your way. And that's how you, to me, become a person that they love and not just a fly-by night actor.

It doesn't matter because I want to be that guy who you never know what I'm going to wear.

I like challenges. If you're involved, as one is, in filmmaking, you want to challenge yourself. You don't want to repeat what you're done before.

I always dressed funny or weird, if you want to call it that. It was always part of who I am and I dressed in my freakish way a long time before we ever thought about founding Orgy.

It's not really into the big mass movement in music that I want to do, you know.

Nothing is good for a nation but that which arises from its own core and its own general wants, without apish imitation of another.

I'm a more skilled writer now, but after 23 books it's harder to be fresh and that's really important to me. I don't want to write the same thing over and over again.

There are so many great artists that are doing interesting things, that I don't want to focus on boring people.

The truth is, I just want do things that are original and throw an original spin on them.

People want to be liked by other people so they adopt other people's standards, but for me, my standard had always been true.

And to be different is great. You don't want to be the same.

I think it's definitely important to look like yourself on a date. You don't want to look like someone else with too much makeup or too much hair.

Labels don't mean anything to me. I'm trying to play as passionately as I'm able to. If they want to call that cool, that's fine. Just spell the name right, is the formula.

If it works for the piece of music, I'm going to use it. I don't want to be limited any more than [Bob] Dylan wanted to be limited by not using an electric guitar.

What I don't do is try to like become whoever I'm rapping with. The people who go get an LL album want to hear LL.

I write whatever shows up. That's good enough for me. I'm part of the first generation that wants to still do original material and not tour around as an oldies act.

Don't write the book you think publishers want to commission. Plenty of other writers will be doing the same thing.