Quotes About Originality

My greatest pleasure is to invent. My continual mad ambition is to make something true and beautiful that never existed in the world before.

Part of the joy and pleasure of English is its boundless creativity: I can describe a new machine as bicyclish, I can say that I'm vitamining myself to stave off a cold, I can complain that someone is the smilingest person I've ever seen, and I can decide, out of the blue, that 'fetch' is now the word I want to use to mean 'cool.'

Learn your instrument. Be honest. Don't do anything phony. There is so much crap floating around. There is plenty of room for a bit of honest writing.

We Americans love original ideas. But truly, there are already plenty of good ones out there, ours for the taking. If I were too proud to copy the ideas of others, I likely wouldn't have even a fraction of my current success.

I feel like there is plenty of room for fresh ideas, always.

It is very challenging to make a fresh screenplay based on a used plot.

Even as a kid, I wore J.C. Penney plain-pocket jeans because they were plain pockets. I didn't want anybody's name on my backside. I personally don't like to wear clothing that is named for somebody or has someone's likeness all over it.

Whether you listen to a piece of music, or a poem, or look at a picture or a jug, or a piece of sculpture, what matters about it is not what it has in common with others of its kind, but what is singularly its own.

Robert Frost had always said you mustn't think of the last line first, or it's only a fake poem, not a real one. I'm inclined to agree.

Even when I was in school, I was doing papers and writing poems; I always had an edge to my delivery. It was never conscious, but it was more so my organic way of thinking about things.

There is no scientific discoverer, no poet, no painter, no musician, who will not tell you that he found ready made his discovery or poem or picture - that it came to him from outside, and that he did not consciously create it from within.

I'm not literary, and I'm not academic, and I don't think like a poet, so my stuff will never be like that.

I'd like to be known as the person who saw things from a different point of view to others.

When you make stuff from the 'you' point of view, you really can't go wrong.

I think comedy has to come from your authentic point of view.

The thing I try to tell people who are just starting in the business is to listen to yourself, trust yourself, and be kind to yourself. And do the work to cultivate who you are and what your point of view is. Don't try to be like anybody else. That's what will make you an interesting artist.

I think if you're going to cover a song, you should definitely take it apart and put it back together as if you wrote it. I don't think you should sing it the same way that the artist sang it - that's kind of pointless.

I think the main thing is to continue being true to myself. I'll never do anything just to cater or pander to the audience I have. I need to be 100% behind it too. Otherwise it's completely pointless.

What I don't like is talking points.

Not everyone can say, 'I'm going to write a classic today.' If that was the case, we'd all be doing it.

People classify things and that's fair enough. But if somebody wants to make something different, that doesn't make them any less of an artist.

Cleanliness is the scourge of art.

When everyone thinks alike, no one is thinking clearly.

I love Simone Rocha. I just think she's really clever.