Doug Stanhope Quotes

...the people at large absolutely gave James Brown respect. He was an original like a Rembrandt or a Picasso

I know when somebody's heard my music. I can hear it in their music.

I can understand when people copy people of the past and make the future their own.

Any creator owes a debt to past creation.

I just love Bowie. I think he's the ultimate inventor.

You don't create legends out of other legends.

The Great don't innovate, they fertilize seeds planted by lackeys, they leave to others the inhaling of the flowers whose roots they've manured. A deceptive memory may be the key to their originality.

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

I want to make my own path and leave behind a good legacy for myself and honestly, I just want to be innovative and always down for other people. That's what I want to be remembered by. I want to inspire.

The Beatles did everything long before anyone else. They weren't afraid to try things and to experiment with a lot of sounds. In 200 years, when you look up 'rock and roll' in the dictionary, it'll have a picture of the Beatles next to it.

People are always talking about originality; but what do they mean? As soon as we are born, the world begins to work upon us; and this goes on to the end. And after all, what can we call our own, except energy, strength, and will? If I could give an account of all that I owe to great predecessors and contemporaries, there would be but a small balance in my favor.

People are always talking about originality, but what do they mean? As soon as we are born, the world begins to work upon us, and this goes on to the end.

I knew the Beatles songs and how influential they are to other bands, but I'm not a fanatic, so I could look outside the box and observe.

What's so exciting is to be able to just take something and polish it so much that hopefully in the future people will start borrowing things from it.

I'm going to do whatever it takes to be able to affect people the same way I've been affected by the music I love.

Often an idea has impact far larger than the person who originated it.

One of the reasons that the Ramones were so unique and original was that they were four original, unique people.

No one is original. Everyone is derivative.

The extent of his influence across jazz, across American music, and around the world has such continuing stature that he is one of the few who can easily be mentioned with Stravinsky, Picasso and Joyce. His life was the embodiment of one who moves from rags to riches, from anonymity to internationally imitated innovator. Louis Daniel Armstrong supplied revolutionary language that took on such pervasiveness that it became commonplace, like the light bulb, the airplane, the telephone.

We're all standing on the shoulders of what other people have done. But you're supposed to take that and add your own sauce. It can be intimidating, believe me.

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.

People get tired of the same old sound. They want something new.

You're not going to be able to look like anyone else, no matter how hard you try, unless you're a mimic, then you're not acting, you're just mimicking. You can't go on being John Wayne, that's John Wayne. So you're not going to steal from John Wayne. I'm not going to steal from John Wayne and you're not going to come back and say 'Didn't you get that from the circus?' You know. But he is one of those people who instructs me, whom I look up to - whom I think is one of the masters of his craft that I am so enamoured of.

You don't know how many people come up to me and say, 'This child was conceived listening to you.'

Eventually you'll take the phrases and rhythm patterns you've copped and begin to put your own mark on them