Lena Waithe Quotes

The hardest part is not to repeat yourself. I don't really believe my core obsessions are going to change, but you need to look for ways to express them that are different. The main reason for doing that is not to bore yourself, and obviously, I don't want to bore readers.

If you're involved in with something that's original, you know, you'll always go back and try to rehash it.

Generally what I produce is new. Of course, they are often variations on the same subject.

Life would be much easier if I just wrote the same book over and over again. But I'm not interested in doing that.

I didn't want to write the same book over and over.

I take references from the past and flip them.

For me, it would be pointless to write a novel that I knew I could complete within a specific length of time. I could do that only by repeating something I had done before, and I've never wanted to do that.

There are no new ideas. There are only new ways of making them felt.

What is genius but the power of expressing a new individuality?

When you put something out there into the world, there's all these words you don't want to hear, that you hope people don't say. I don't like anything that starts with 're' - like retro, reinvent, recreate - I hate that. It's always like living in the past - copying, emulating.

I fear becoming formulaic. Some of my books are.

Of course you can't do anything completely original.

Just finding ways to be not provocative for provocative's sake, but to show an idea that hasn't been shown before, I mean that's interesting to me.

You must be very creative in our business. Creating in this business is making something new, but it is also touching on something old.

As a songwriter, you always want to search for something that's right in front of you that you can twist into something new.

A little bit of one story joins onto an idea from another, and hey presto, . . . not old tales but new ones. Nothing comes from nothing.

Originality, of course, is what occurs when something new arises out of what's already been done.

Utter originality is, of course, out of the question.

Genius gives birth, talent delivers. What Rembrandt or Van Gogh saw in the night can never be seen again. Born writers of the future are amazed already at what they're seeing now, what we'll all see in time for the first time, and then see imitated many times by made writers.

Copying isn’t particularly creative work. Being inspired by someone else’s idea to produce something new and different IS creative work.

I have to believe everything I write is brand new and I'm writing in this way about these people in a completely new situation for the very first time.

If you're always thinking about someone else's work, about the tradition you're working in, how can you possibly make anything good?

A lot of things you just stumble into: relationships or ways of putting characters opposite one another that really worked. So then it's not always so much about imitating other people, but imitating yourself, at least in your thinking.

You cannot possibly invent painting all by yourself.

Artists rarely do the same thing over and over again. Art is about the new, doing things in a new way.