Karl Lagerfeld Quotes

In other words, musicians know that going back to the Spoonful, what we were doing was not copying.

There were times in my career when I would try to write songs like Bob Dylan... Artists get hooked up in that. To be a follower, you lose.

But at a certain point, you have to take your influence and find your own voice if you want to become a relevant artist.

If you look at any creative person's work, you can see bits and pieces of their influences. That's what an artist does.

Good writers borrow from other writers. Great writers steal from them outright.

Probably 90 percent of the stuff I make has inevitably been done before... Whether it's playing Hamlet, which has been on the go for 400 years, or pieces from the cinematic world that also have been essayed before, I feel released by that.

What I've learned is that it's okay to take from heroes, such as Debussy, but it has to be filtered through my own personality so that ultimately it's me.

I steal from every movie ever made.

For years, I was watching other people have so much fun playing out their version of authorship, like Louis C.K. and Larry David. As I watched them do their thing, I began to pine for the days when I had a lot less expected of me and, often, a lot more creative freedom. The courage that those guys have is always captivating to me.

As I've matured as a songwriter, I realize that if it's out there, it's mine.

If you're always thinking about someone else's work, about the tradition you're working in, how can you possibly make anything good?

Our influences are who we are. It's rare that anything is an absolutely pure vision; even Daniel Johnston sounds like the Beatles. And that's the problem with the bands I'm always asked about, the ones derivative of the early Seattle sound. They don't dilute their influences enough.

The trouble is, once you say something about a source, then you've pegged it down, and so now I'm reluctant to say anything. If I say I developed 50 different shapes from Mississippian tumuli, that doesn't mean they're copies of tumuli - I'm not ripping off those shapes.

I was never so directly inspired by fashion. It always came from somewhere else.

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 don't really care who gets their inspiration from where, it's the end results that count.

For a while, I felt a little self-impelled to write Lou Reed Kind of songs. I should have understood that a Lou Reed song was anything I wanted to write about.

All writers are magpies, right? We're always stealing bits from different places and then weaving them into our little nest.

It's not like what I do or what I wear is my copyright. What I'm wearing now also is an inspiration. It is how I saw it on the mannequin, and I just wore it, so it's in a way copied. But obviously, I wouldn't want to spend my life thinking about dresses. It is such a waste of life.

I don't think I'm influencing younger artists - they're not trying to be me. But I don't say that in bitterness. I say that with realism.

I'm not trying to feed off of a concept that another artist had - that's not what I do.

The moment you start thinking about what other people and other artists think, you're going to start writing like other people.

I get excited to create things that don't exist in the same world as 'Hamilton' because that world is really well done and doesn't need me to inform it anymore.

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.

I feel like I have to create the Keith Whitley sound. That doesn't mean I can't borrow from the people I grew up listening to, but it doesn't serve any purpose to sing the same kind of songs they sang. When you do that, it's going to come out sounding like an imitation, whether it's meant to or not.