Edith Wharton Quotes

I don't find myself so exercised by a desperation to be new.

Everybody wants you to do this thing that you've always been doing forever. That's what they want: they want Martin Scorsese to make the same film two hundred times rather than trying to be something different.

If it feels like we're re-creating something rather than creating something, we don't do it.

You can't just be a rock star by rehashing things you've seen or done before. Bring something new, which is what hip-hop does best.

In professional work - certainly in the arts and graphics - 99% of people have zero courage. They blow with the wind.

Rap is really just too conventional. Everybody does the same thing. No one ever pushes the box.

In my view, the plangent artificiality of a lot of creative work results from the fact that the people who write novels, direct films and put on plays tend to read too many novels, watch too many films and go to too many plays.

I don't just want to be another cog in the gears of Hollywood.

Theater is dangerously open to repetition. It's exciting when you hit on a new way.

It's so important to me that I feel like I'm doing something that's never been done before, whether that's in the show, or I'm writing a song. I can exist in this little box here, but I have to do something new with it.

There's no room for being a visionary in the studio system. It literally cannot exist.

Good taste is the first refuge of the non-creative. It is the last-ditch stand of the artist.

Success is dangerous. One begins to copy oneself, and to copy oneself is more dangerous than to copy others. It leads to sterility.

Artists rarely do the same thing over and over again. Art is about the new, doing things in a new way.

Do not quench your inspiration and your imagination; do not become the slave of your model.

When the vision of the 'Nude' flashed upon me, I knew that it would break forever the enslaving chains of Naturalism.

Before I do anything, I think, well what hasn't been seen. Sometimes, that turns out to be something ghastly and not fit for society. And sometimes that inspiration becomes something that's really worthwhile.

I don't like playing standards. I like to do my own cutting edge work.

My pleasure was to copy, not to create.

The entertainment business hasn't had a new idea in years.

What worse illness can there be than acute conventionality. You should pray every night that you don't wake up with it.

I like to release music the way I feel it, as opposed to having a date. The idea of dates, boxes, categories are very scary for me.

I don't want to do the song-dance formula; there are many people doing it, right?

Creativity has got to have some edge to it, doesn't it?

Just finding ways to be not provocative for provocative's sake, but to show an idea that hasn't been shown before, I mean that's interesting to me.