Michel Gondry Quotes

People who cannot invent and reinvent themselves must be content with borrowed postures, secondhand ideas, fitting in instead of standing out.

I feel like it's important, especially at young age, to find exactly what it is that makes your style so important as opposed to just trying to fit into the iconic styles of performers out there.

I guess if you have an original take on life, or something about you is original, you don't have to study people who came before you. You don't have to mimic anybody. You just have a gut feeling inside, an instinct that tells you what's right for you, and you can't do it in any other way.

To me, searching for perfection isn't anywhere near as interesting as trying to find your own voice.

Everyone should pursue whatever is original in oneself. That's the way for a long life in music.

If you think about what everyone else will think, you forget to just make music.

You can filter certain stuff - it depends what artist you are - but you're never going to be true to yourself if you're worried about what other people think.

You can't put me in a box, because then it's just like, you're not gonna get anything.

Be stupid, be dumb, be funny, if that's who you are. Don't try to be someone that society wants you to be; that's stupid. So be yourself.

Write or draw or build or sing or live as only you can. And I hope, somewhere in the next year, you surprise yourself.

It's a shame to waste [the uniqueness that is you], by doing what someone else has done.

Each individual's way is going to be different. Never follow anybody. That is the greatest calamity that can happen to a man. Once you start following somebody else, you become a carbon copy. You become an imitation.

Lifestyle is the art of discovering ways to live uniquely.

If you're always looking at someone else, trying to imitate them, how can your natural gifts ever emerge?

All effort at originality must end either in the quaint or the monstrous. For no man knows himself as an original; he can only believe it on the report of others.

What Kierkegaard said about love is also true of creativity: every person must start at the beginning.

If I wasted my time trying to be like everybody else when I was 10 and 11, I wouldn't be me today. So if you are gonna be the future rockstars, the future somebody, whatever you wanna be then you're wasting your time trying to be somebody else, because you'll never get to you.

It is foolish to try to imitate the skills of others.

I discovered very early that it wasn't quite enough for me to imitate people.

I've learnt that I've had the best results from just trying to be me, trying to make a movie or TV show I want to see or write a script I want to read, and that's really all I can offer - being authentic.

No age is compelled to take its beauty from preceding epochs.

The more time we invest imitating others, the less that's available to discover and be ourselves.

The minute you succumb to outside pressure, you cease to be creative.

I stay true to myself and my style, and I am always pushing myself to be aware of that and be original.

I'd hate it if everyone in the world liked me, my music and what I wore. It'd make it boring, and I wouldn't have anything to work towards. It's not to everyone's taste, but I can only be me.