Quotes About Originality

The world isn't all happy, shiny people, and great art doesn't come from vanilla. Great art comes from people with a point of view and are very passionate.

I don't ever want to be considered some vanilla sherbet kinda guy.

I'm one of the few that comes from this vantage point: I never tried to get a record deal.

For a writer, you definitely do not want to be in the mainstream. You want to be on the edge because that's where the vantage point is. That's where you can see.

We don't like trends. We formed initially because we felt we had something of our own to say. What was happening was lacking in certain aspects - it needed a different point of view, a variant on things, but with the same attack, impact.

New things get noticed. This means you can't be afraid to present something new to your market, even if it's just a variation or an addition to an already-existing product or service.

Generally what I produce is new. Of course, they are often variations on the same subject.

Mainly, what I like to do is keep things varied and not get in a rut, not tell the same stories over and over.

However varied you try to make your work, you still bump up against the end of you. You keep knocking into a wall, and the wall is your own skull. But when you adapt somebody's work, it's like a door into somewhere else. It feels like a holiday from myself.

I am a variety machine; I look for variety in my characters, and an extra edge in the characterisation helps in bringing out a better performance.

I want to do something that people have not seen before... surprise everyone. There has to be variety in work.

I always try to look for variety in my work.

As for insecurity, I have none because I know nobody has offered variety in comedy like I have.

Here's something weird, though: I loved Jimi's music so much that I would never perform it for people. Throughout my teens and playing in various bands, I refused to play Hendrix songs. I know that sounds strange, but Jimi's music was so special to me that it was like works of art that shouldn't be touched or altered.

The vast masterpieces of art, business, science, and humanity were not constructed by practical people.

I increasingly fear that nothing good can come of almost any adaptation, and obviously that's sweeping. There are a couple of adaptations that are perhaps as good or better than the original work. But the vast majority of them are pointless.

The main pillar of my activity is making clothes, but this can never be the perfect and only vehicle of expression.

The real problem you get with humour is that you only have so many kinds of jokes within you, and you mine that vein a lot. This isn't just common to me; it's anybody who's funny.

That's what I think is smart about 'Durham County.' It's not derivative of anything American. It's more in the vein of the BBC miniseries I grew up with.

I wouldn't start writing songs like 'Name' all the time just because I thought that's what people wanted to hear. I'll write a song in the same vein because it's what I want to write.

If you make a strange, eccentric record - like the Velvet Underground's 'White Light/White Heat' - it takes on its own mood because it's less about a shrewd marketing plan; it's more about an individual emotion.

'You Talk' was originally a copy of a certain Velvet Underground song.

After all, we are not French and never can be, and any attempt to be so is to deny our inheritance and to try to impose upon ourselves a character that can be nothing but a veneer upon the surface.

To be accused of 'channeling' is to be dismissed as a ventriloquist's live dummy, derogated at not having a mind of one's own.