Amy Sedaris Quotes

Creativity is an act of defiance.

A popular author is one who writes what the people think. Genius invites them to think something else.

To create is to resist; to resist is to create.

You hear again and again that audiences want to see movies that are different, and critics say we make the same thing again and again in Hollywood, then you go and make something different, and you get kicked in the gut for it.

Originality is the one thing which unoriginal minds cannot feel the use of.

I don't want ever to be guilty of what my critics claim: doing formula without original elements.

To be able to create fully, it's maybe fine that you learn the rules, but you have to forget and to rebel against those rules.

I am a leader, so leaders always get heat. They're always going against the grain. Jimi Hendrix got heat; Bob Marley got heat; Miles Davis got heat. Every great artist got heat. Heat means you're doing something right.

You want to do something, you want to have the bravery to do something original. And there will always be people who are like, the classicists who are like, 'No, but it's got to have this.' In life, there are people like that attached to every single thing that there is. These are the same people that are like, still playing vinyl.

We travellers are in very hard circumstances. If we say nothing but what has been said before us, we are dull and have observed nothing. If we tell anything new, we are laughed at as fabulous and romantic.

The American people ... have a stake in con-conformity, for they know that the American genius is non-conformist.

Human progress is furthered, not by conformity, but by aberration.

I hate anything that seems like something that has been done.

There's not enough people being daring and different. There are a lot of followers in hip-hop.

Every revolutionary poet or lyricist has been criticised for something. If you come up with something new, there will always be people who will object to it.

We never want to toe the line.

I just gotta keep doing what I'm doing, and just continuing to grow and progress as an artist. People who are saying that about Lil B need to be innovative and not be tools.

I hate good taste. It's the worst thing that can happen to a creative person.

In a moment when criticism shows a singular dearth of direction every man has to be a law unto himself in matters of theatre, writing, and painting. While the American Mercury and the new Ford continue to spread a thin varnish of Ritz over the whole United States there is a certain virtue in being unfashionable.

I don't write the same book over and over - I think if I did that, I would stop writing. I couldn't write a series with the same character, and I couldn't write a romance novel over and over again that takes place at a different beach every year. That's not who I am.

The disobedient child is continuously condemned. The obedient child is, on the other hand, continuously praised. But have you heard of any obedient child having become world-famous in any dimension of creativity? Have you heard of any obedient child who has attained the Nobel prize for anything - literature, peace, science? The obedient child becomes just the common crowd. All that is added to existence is added by the disobedient.

The ideas aren't that important. Really they aren't. Everyone's got an idea for a book, a movie, a story, a TV series.

Creativity is the greatest rebellion in existence.

Conformists die, but heretics live forever.

All art is based on non-conformity.