James A. Michener Quotes

I don't want to write formula. I don't want to crank these books out like sausages. Every book is different, which takes a hell of a lot of ingenuity on my part.

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.

I think that all my albums are different enough where I don't feel like I did this the last time.

I mix everything up. A museum curator once said to me that there is a great jazz component to the way I do things because good jazz is improvisation and draws elements from all different cultures. And that's the way I do everything - the way I dress and decorate.

Just trying to be different - when I hear something - I don't like to go trampling on other people's sounds.

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.

No two people on earth are alike, and it's got to be that way in music or it isn't music.

People don't want just vanilla. They want 31 flavors. I couldn't do what Rihanna does. I couldn't do what Gaga does. They can't do what I do.

I'm always trying to find something unique or a project that I can do something unique in.

What is nice about country music today is that most artists are not trying to do something everybody else is doing. They really are trying to develop their own uniqueness.

Given New York City's cultural diversity, it has always attracted creative people.

Art is permitted to survive only if it renounces the right to be different.

I want to show my versatility and how diverse I am, how I approach the track, my rhythm, my melodies. It's something different. Sometimes, the things I do haven't ever been done.

There is something about the sameness people like. And what I've tried to do with all the zombie films is purposely make them different. That may be part of why it takes so long for people to see what it's intended to be.

The movies I do have to be different in some way. Nothing vanilla will do.

For the individual and for society, the more diversity you have in a field means more ways of solving a problem as well as more creativity and originality.

People classify things and that's fair enough. But if somebody wants to make something different, that doesn't make them any less of an artist.

Creativity is making a good pass at the right time... but it can also come from deeper, there should always be a balance.

I don't write the same book twice.

Stylistically, things are becoming cooler. People are trying different things and combining genres.

Creative instinct is personal.

I don't believe in making two songs similar. Every composition must have its own unique character.

Everything becomes creative if the person doing the job is

A scientist, an artist, a citizen is not like a child who needs papa methodology and mama rationality to give him security and direction, he can take care of himself, for he is the inventor not only of laws, theories, pictures, plays, forms of music, ways of dealing with his fellow man, institutions, but also entire world view, he is the inventor of entire forms of like.

I've always been creative, with a huge amount of energy.