Mark Millar Quotes

Some of us have great original ideas and some of us depend on adaptations.

Lesser artists borrow, great artists steal.

I take stuff because I'm inspired by it.

I don't think I really invented anybody. I have drawn on real life.

I think that a lot of people just don't understand creativity.

You cannot possibly invent painting all by yourself.

When starting a project, your influences are the things around you. It doesn't mean you have to sound like it or look like it or anything. It's just something new, and your curiosity becomes enthralled by it.

The imagination imitates. It is the critical spirit that creates.

There's nothing new, even 'new' is inspired by something. We're all, either consciously or unconsciously, we're inspired.

I think that other people covering my work is really exciting... Im really open to that kind of thing because I think interpretation is an art form.

Telling people how to be creative is easy - being creative is difficult.

You can’t learn your craft by copying me or anyone else. I hope what I do can do is in some way inspire others but I would be appalled if I thought my work was being studied as ‘the right way to do the job’. My way is just one of an infinite number of ways to do the job.

We all borrow and steal and copy from each other, and that's the way I think people get inspired.

You start by copying other people's paintings or music or whatever. You get all of those skills before you branch out. Really creative people have a fantastic ability to copy things and then combine them in new ways. And whether we're talking about genes or memes, recombination is the real heart of creativity.

Beware of direct inspiration. It leads too quickly to repetitions of what inspired you.

An artist must be very careful not to look for models. As soon as one artist takes another as model, he is lost. There is no other point of departure than reality.

I'm not judging the films. People make these connections through a film, or because they know them. But the fact that they erase them and have to start from scratch, I think that's an important point. A lot of kids, when they have a camera, have tended to do remakes of existing films. You have a lot of kids that make Star Wars. And I think that's creativity, but not as much creativity as starting from scratch.

In our work, the question is, how much you absorb from others. So for me, creativity, is really like a relay race. As children we are handed a baton. Rather than passing it onto the next generation as is, first we need to digest it and make it our own.

One musician listens to another musician, and you get inspired and then you do your thing, but it's yours.

If an artist may say nothing except what he has invented by his own sole efforts, it stands to reason he will be poor in ideas. If he could take what he wants wherever he could find it, as Euripides and Dante and Michelangelo and Shakespeare and Bach were free, his larder would always be full, and his cookery might be worth tasting.

Jean Renoir once suggested that most true creators have only one idea and spend their lives reworking it, but then very rapidly he added that most people don't have any ideas at all, so one idea is pretty amazing.

Imitation, if noble and general, insures the best hope of originality.

Imitation always stinks. When I take photos, I don't go back. I don't look at the past. I'm always original.

We artists can only go so far as the people can follow us. We are not alone, we are part of the system. We can take risks, but if you want to go to the peak of your consciousness, you may very well find yourself alone. Even if you know how to translate what you see, maybe only ten people will be able to understand what you tell. But, if you have faith in your vision, and retell it again and again, you will start noticing that, after a time, more people will begin to catch up with you.

Someone very smart once said to me, "Steal, don't borrow." So if there's anything good in anything anyone else does, it's fair game. I think that everything I've ever done at some point is part of someone else's legacy.