Quotes About Originality

I stray away from formulaic, the formatted.

I've always had an idealistic streak about storytelling in that I believe we owe more to audiences than repeatedly bludgeoning them over the head while stealing their lunch money. We owe them inspiration. That's why I'm more interested now in creating new heroes than hooking up jumper cables to old ones.

I like it when I see people dressed on the street, and it looks like Gucci, but it's not. It means you are doing something right.

My philosophy through all my work, be it on canvas or on the street, is about pushing boundaries and not going with the flow because everyone else is doing something a certain way.

Hip-hop is so saturated with the same old same old that people always expect the guy to actually be the guy. They want you to be real and straight from the streets and all that.

I try to keep my ear to the streets without sacrificing who I am as an artist. If a song needs a drum machine I'll use a drum machine. If it needs a drummer, I'll use a real drummer.

When I made 'Feed tha Streets,' those were the only 17 songs I had made, period. There was no cutting songs out or adding other songs in.

I realized that my strength was being different.

Thinking differently is my strength.

Don't try to be anyone else. Don't try to emulate what someone is doing. Play to your strengths.

You can learn from others but you have to be yourself. You can't start out with the idea that you have to copy others, you have to play to your strengths.

I want to stress to people to be themselves instead of trying to be like others.

The secret to a great Halloween costume, and I can't stress this enough, is in my opinion is to extract sexuality out of your costume.

Investigative pieces tend to be great stories because they haven't been told before. The process can be frustrating and stressful, but the result is often deeply rewarding.

On stage you're supposed to have fun and play different licks and stretch out. You're not supposed to copy your records exactly.

On nights that I'm feeling a need to stretch personally and artistically, I tend to put together outfits that are very quirky, mismatched and over-the-top eclectic.

I think every album you have to stretch further and further, give people another piece of you. But then I always try to deviate from the norm.

'Auto Music' isn't a pop record by any stretch.

I don't want to come in and do something that's been done before. You know, for me, it's not that I wouldn't come in and do a sequel to something, but it's only if I can bring something new to the table and I'm not following an extremely strict path.

Whenever a film doesn't follow to the letter the preset strict conventional rules of today's commercial cinema, it's considered weird.

Invention, strictly speaking, is little more than a new combination of those images which have been previously gathered and deposited in the memory; nothing can come of nothing.

I am strictly against remaking a movie.

I can make a record with six-part string arrangements and the best musicians in the world and have it be not genuine. I'd rather make a genuine record that I truly stand behind and have it fall where it may.

The isolation of Eastern Europe actually helped me to be so original. I couldn't travel so much, I had to find my own things, such as making the strings sound like electronic music.