Mike Flanagan Quotes

The best imitation in the world is not half as good as a poor original.

You can't copy anybody and end with anything. If you copy, it means you're working without any real feeling.

When a writer tries to copy another writer, it's doomed to fail.

Posterity weaves no garlands for imitators.

I realized that I could try to sound like Waylon Jennings, or I could try to be like Waylon Jennings... but it's impossible to do both.

To copy others is necessary, but to copy oneself is pathetic.

I decided that if my work contained what I could identify as a likeness to other work, I would remove it.'

Great artists are people who find the way to be themselves in their art. Any sort of pretension induces mediocrity in art and life alike.

I don't want to record anything unless it can be great and genuinely interesting.

I'd rather have people really be able to step back and get their money's worth and look at me as a true artist than somebody who is just regurgitating other material.

If you copy, it means you're working without any real feeling. No two people on earth are alike, and it's got to be that way in music or it isn't music.

You know, there's so much imitation and so much pandering in Hollywood.

Don't imitate. Write what you know about, that has to be your goal.

I'd rather do my own performance than copy someone else's.

Your manuscript is both good and original; but the part that is good is not original, and the part that is original is not good.

I don't want nobody to ever say, 'I coulda done that beat' or 'I know where you got that from.'

A lot of artists are aspiring to fill an archetype as opposed to being themselves. Even if they can't quite put their finger on it, fans can tell.

No artist wants to be perceived as a regurgitator.

I wouldn't disrespect myself or my art with any imitations.

Don't try to be original; just try to be good.

Go and see what others have produced, but never copy anything except nature. You would be trying to enter into a temperament that is not yours and nothing that you would do would have any character.

It's hard work to find your own voice and not to copycat anything.

There is no intellectual or emotional substitute for the authentic, the original, the unique masterpiece.

I don't think anybody came into the movie business to be unoriginal and plagiarising and not having an original idea in their brain.

Originality is undetected plagiarism.