Iris Apfel Quotes

In a society that tries to standardize thinking, individuality is not highly prized.

If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.

Thank goodness I was never sent to school; it would have rubbed off some of the originality.

Don't try to write to the trend of the moment.

I think, as an artist, part of your job is being aware of what's going on around you and not selling out and not following the trend, which I'm totally against.

I'm against fashionable thinking.

When you're just like everybody else, you've nothing to offer other than your conformity.

The educator should do anything but advise the child to do what everybody does. He should rather rejoice when he sees in the child tendencies to deviation.

I think most people don't like others who, without a voice of their own, emulate the other. I certainly don't want anybody just to pick up my thoughts and hand them back to me.

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.

It doesn't really matter to me what the rest of country is doing. I'm not caught up in trying to make a record that sounds like everybody else. That, to me, is a record label's absolute biggest downfall.

I stray away from formulaic, the formatted.

The problem with competition is that it takes away the requirement to set your own path, to invent your own method, to find a new way.

I'd never just want to do what everybody else did. I'd be contributing to the sameness of everything.

There's nothing worse than having everybody thinking alike, talking alike and having the same direction in mind. It gets stale that way.

I always had that sense of being censored for the things that I thought. Why is it wrong to embroider your pants, or paint with acrylics on your clothing? Why is that weird? Isn't it weirder to want to be like everyone else?

Never judge something by whether it is popular or not. You don't have to follow trends. No one thought William Wilberforce was right at first.

They're never gonna not put you in a box. It's something that they have to do, because nine times out of 10 people don't understand creativity.

I've never tried to be accepted. When everyone is doing one thing, I've always had the instinct to go the other way. I don't understand how an individual with their own mind, their own values, and their own beliefs can be so willing to just follow what everybody else is doing. How can you make history doing what everybody else is doing?

I like more the fact that I like to think out of the box. Thinking out of the box goes along with dressing out of the box and living out of the box.

Whatever an education is, it should make you a unique individual, not a conformist.

Just as no great painting has ever been created by a committee, no great vision has ever emerged from the herd.

Men have been taught that it is a virtue to agree with others. But the creator is the man who disagrees. Men have been taught that it is a virtue to swim with the current. But the creator is the man who goes against the current. Men have been taught that it is a virtue to stand together. But the creator is the man who stands alone.

It has bothered me all my life that I do not paint like everybody else.

It does not matter how badly you paint so long as you don't paint badly like other people.