Quotes About Originality

Usually when painters use photographs, they enlarge and copy them and simply make a large, boring painting of a large, boring photograph.

Photography has become a small world with so many jealous people. You do a story and then a lot of people try to do the same thing.

The computer has played a role in destroying creativity with the Photoshop. Everybody thinks they're a designer.

I object to the actual phrase 'Follow me.' You've gotta be kidding! Why would I want to follow anybody else? Nor do I want them to follow me. The machinations of my life, the banalities - they're mine. They belong to me.

If we want to take a bunch of phrases and run them through a Google and say 'Hey, who else has said them,' I can come up with the list in five minutes.

What we want to be is something completely new. There is no physical analog for what Amazon.com is becoming.

Personally, I am not so affected by my environment. What I build in the creative process is not necessarily connected to what I am physically in contact with. I am always observing everything, but it will not necessarily have a direct impact on what I do.

I decided that playing piano was a little bit too common, you know what I mean?

Picasso once remarked I do not care who it is that has or does influence me as long as it is not myself.

I'm not saying I'm the best. There are many painters in the world. But there is only one Picasso.

My first influence obviously was Picasso.

I look at people like Picasso and Da Vinci and Escher and Miles Davis, and they'll write or paint that one definitive masterpiece of maybe 50 that they have that's really trying to go outside the box, trying to do something that's tough. And then when you accomplish it, you look back and go, 'Yeeaaaah - masterpiece.'

Our artistic heroes tend to be those self-exercisers, like Picasso, and Nabokov, and Wallace Stevens, who rather defiantly kept playing past dark.

Of course we'd rather not see Picasso teacups and sheets.

I have 40 years of unpublished material, the ones they don't pick, and the reason I don't redraw them or use them again is that I like to use my brain every day and come up with new jokes.

I don't have to carry myself as anybody that I'm not, and people picked up on it.

We just did a few takes of a song and just picked the best one. It was real organic and genuine.

When me and Eric did songs back in the day, we didn't go and sit down in front of no A&R. We made our album, and then, when we finished, we handed it in, and then we picked the best song for the first single.

I'm not always the best at picking out what goes together. I always want to be presentable, but more than that, I want to be different. I've never just wanted to follow the crowd. I think that goes back to when I was a boy. If everyone was doing one thing, I'd do something different.

I love dressing up. I like going out and buying some crazy stuff. I like stuff that's new, innovative and weird. I just pick out stuff that is unique and anything that I'm really diggin'. I don't really care if it's kind of out there. That's what I'm about. I like picking stuff that is really different.

It's not fair to compare one artist to another because they all come with their own sort of elements to the picnic, you know.

I don't want to dress up a picture with just my face.

I wouldn't use the same color in a picture in more than one place.

And, since the model he faithfully copies is not going to be hung up next to the picture, since the picture is going to be there on its own, it is of no interest whether it is an accurate copy of the model.