Quotes About Originality

Find your own specific voice in filmmaking and go for it. Either people will get it or they won't and that's what it's all about.

What makes a specific quality or quantity of innovation retain its intense newness over the years?

For me, it would be pointless to write a novel that I knew I could complete within a specific length of time. I could do that only by repeating something I had done before, and I've never wanted to do that.

I think I'm always conscious of not letting things fit into a specific box. Being a filmmaker and trying to chart a career, you never want anyone to be able to pigeonhole you into one specific thing.

I made a real specific decision when I came out of school and most artists were writing about home - if you were a woman, you were writing about being a woman - and I decided not to do that, write about what you know. That's not what I do. I went as far away from home as possible in terms of the development of my imagination.

I think a lot of singer-songwriters get compared to each other, but I'd like to think that what I'm doing is special and specific to me.

I don't really set out to please anybody, and I don't think I ever have. I have occasionally been encouraged to try to write something specifically for the purpose of releasing it as a single to get radio play. Those are not my best songs, as a rule.

Janelle Monae, she has her own style, and it's specifically hers.

I tend not to go look at movies before I make a movie. I'd rather not be specifically influenced.

What can I do, I asked myself, that is so spectacular that no one will be able to say he had seen it before? The answer was perfectly obvious. I would send a midget up to bat.

I'm always at the opposite end of the spectrum, the opposite of hipster culture, and I enjoy that.

Political speeches might represent the ideas of the politician at hand, but often times, it's not written in their own words.

Mr. Fitzgerald, I believe that is how he spells his name, seems to believe that plagiarism begins at home.

I don't think in a box. I think in a sphere.

I think it's being innovative and very creative to stay away from flat-out sampling somebody else's record. To me, that doesn't show too much of your creative side unless you take a little piece and add it, almost like spice on a chicken.

I'm most comfortable being myself, but I will admit to having an abnormal amount of fun being the King of Spice.

I don't want to be like Spider-man or Batman, the do-gooder kind of thing.

If there's one thing that I've learned from both Spike Lee and Tarantino, it's that you can wear your influences on your sleeve but at the same time invoke new energy and new flavor.

When I wrote 'Noughts and Crosses', I was halfway through it when I realised this was very like 'Romeo and Juliet'... as long as you make it your own, and put your own spin on it, I think it's brilliant to use other great work to find your own voice.

I wrote a song called 'Four Times A Lady' for Destiny's Child, and it was perfect. But then I had to spin it back and change all the lyrics to a guy's point of view cos I thought the track was too good to give away, heh heh. It's Craig David now.

I'm kinda a first take dude. The first time, cut that mic on, and the spirit is there, and what comes on the mic - I mean, even if I'm mumbling, I like to keep a lot of that initial thing that comes out. Cause that's the spirit.

Everybody has an idea of the kind of society they'd like to live in, and I would like to live in one where our senior politicians were spirited and original and possibly even good at what they do.

Thanks to the arrival of such spirited and purposeful groups as X, the Blasters, R.E.M., and the Replacements, American rock has made a spectacular comeback.

I'm proud of all the movies I've made. They're not sequels, they're not franchises. And the reason I pick my films carefully is that I don't want to spit on my life. I like to think of myself as more than that.