Quotes About Originality

My biggest fear is becoming a parody of myself. That's something I struggle with.

Everybody struggles to come up with stuff that no one has ever seen before. It's a fine line between trying to get creative and doing something that's new, fresh and different - yet, for me, something that's based in reality that would actually work in these situations. These are the keys to great fight scenes and action sequences.

For a struggling filmmaker running low on ideas, public domain is all we have for adapting books.

I think it's a great document of John Stevens' originality. At that time he was already much more fully formed in his conception than I was. I was sort of struggling to keep up, and sometimes it's pretty obvious.

WI played a young Helena Bonham Carter in a BBC film called 'A Dark Adapted Eye,' and I thought she was a completely spellbinding person. Totally unmoved by other people's expectations, fashions or opinions. She's probably the coolest English actress there is. Incredibly idiosyncratic.

On 'Think Like a Man,' they got the best out of me because they allowed me to bring my own cadences and opinions to the character that I was playing. I think we got the best of that particular character.

I learned my lesson early in my career that it's not helpful to go and look at what other people's opinions are.

A lot of people have ideas and opinions on what Avenged Sevenfold should be or what we should do, and I think our No. 1 rule is to always make sure we never listen to any of that and to always do what we believe.

Our objective is always to do something that hasn't been done before, but the opponent has a lot of say over how that works out.

Everyone is trying to do something that hasn't been done and that's a really good thing. You can only do so much with a story and some scripts don't give you the opportunities and other scripts do give you the opportunities to do things that haven't been done before.

Music's always going to evolve, and we can't really stop that, so we have to figure out what's the next thing and how we move towards that as opposed to just being like, 'Oh, cool: let's just continue making tear-out EDM hits that are gonna last 2 months, and then somebody else is making the exact same thing under a different name.'

I would say try to tell stories that you care about as opposed to stories that you think will sell.

Play as well as you can; that's it, as opposed to creating these odd paranoias, trying to be something you're not.

If you're 100% yourself, then you're going to be different no matter what. I have this self-honesty approach as opposed to an ego that a lot of musicians put up. I can be myself, and that's just enough to stand out.

So the best way to understand poetry, which is made by men, is to imitate, and that goes back to making work as a kind of doorway into new work, as opposed to making work as a mirror of the old work.

After 'The Fellowship of the Ring,' the films that followed it, instead of having their own unique aesthetic, they all wanted to be 'Lord of the Rings' as opposed to learning from 'Lord of the Rings.'

Comedy has allowed me to be my 100-percent-true self, as opposed to other places, where I feel like that's been a hindrance. Whether it's music or poetry or hosting, people want you to be something else: they want you to be packaged in a certain way.

Whatever you do, whatever you come up with, whatever you decide on, you can go with it, and if the director or the execs, they like it, then you'll stick with it. That's a good thing, as opposed to having something that's already written.

Take the course opposite to custom and you will almost always do well.

I don't write genre stuff in any form. I'm not interested in it. I always try to do the opposite of that.

Since I know how crazy this business is, I do the opposite of what I see other people doing.

Work is the opposite of creativity.

I've always been the opposite of mainstream. I march to my own beat. It's the only way I know.

Growing up, a lot of people wore baggy stuff. I went in the opposite direction. Just trying to be different.