India Arie Quotes

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

To create something you must be something.

Those who do not want to imitate anything, produce nothing.

We can use techniques in modifying things, in controlling things, but the first impulse has to be something that you simply cannot make just out of technique, or else it becomes perfectly evident that it is nothing but technique that you're exercising.

Creativity is down the tube. And people give a lot of lip service to individuality. I know they all appreciate it, but they all say they would like to do it, but they don't want to work at it, and it doesn't come out of the sky.

I'm constantly trying to be as original as I can.

A mere copier of nature can never produce anything great.

A lot of people forget how important it is to be creative. We get caught up in getting ahead and in day-to-day minutiae. But creativity is a fundamental mode of expression, as is being tenacious and standing by your own convictions and passions, even if it's not the 'popular' choice.

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

Creativity, which is the expression of our originality, helps us stay mindful that what we bring to the world is completely original and cannot be compared.

One must not imitate what one wants to create.

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

What I wanted to hear didn't exist, so it was necessary for me to go out and create it.

No thesaurus can give you those words, no rhyming dictionary. They must happen out of you.

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

The downside of videos is that it will put my vision in front of other people, so they might not get the chance to create their own.

When you're an artist, all you're trying to do is self-express.

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.

We call ourselves creators and we just copy.

No man was ever great by imitation.

I wanted each of my books to be very different from the others, each to be special and uncategorizable, and I knew I could only do that a few times before I was in danger of repeating myself.

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

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

Fashion isn't interesting when it comes from an uninspired place.

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