John Cameron Mitchell Quotes

If you try to create someone else's performance, it becomes a facsimile of a facsimile.

Imitation is a caricature. Any imitation. Find out for yourself.

Even if you try to copy a film shot by shot, you still can't. It's still your own film.

There were times in my career when I would try to write songs like Bob Dylan... Artists get hooked up in that. To be a follower, you lose.

What I've learned is that it's okay to take from heroes, such as Debussy, but it has to be filtered through my own personality so that ultimately it's me.

Quite honestly, if I were doing work related to a living being or historical being where there was visual or audio recordings available, I would find that extremely difficult because I don't know how you would avoid the process of mimicry. And mimicry, to me at any rate, is a very dull prospect.

There was no one in particular I really tried to copy.

All too often, when creative people pick out someone else's creative work as an inspiration, what they end up with is very, very far from the original.

I'm not a mimic.

For creators, especially for me as a composer, I am sure for singers also, it is sad. It is not exciting that we have to create something that someone else has already done before.

I'm just curious how it'd look like if someone tried to remake my work. But I really believe that it's hard to remake of any of my work.

Some of us have great original ideas and some of us depend on adaptations.

I realized that I could try to sound like Waylon Jennings, or I could try to be like Waylon Jennings... but it's impossible to do both.

Lesser artists borrow, great artists steal.

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

I get to study and I got to mimic and what I basically did was I stole from every person that I could steal from. I was an imitator. That's what I was. It was years before I could take all of these things that I loved about all of these different artists and put them together and find my voice.

I don't think I really invented anybody. I have drawn on real life.

My songs are like cheap Neil Young copies.

My pleasure was to copy, not to create.

I strongly suggest that we play down basics like who influenced whom, and instead study the way the influence is transformed, in other words: how the artist made it his own.

I played Othello, but I didn't sit around thinking how Laurence Olivier did it when he played it. That wouldn't do me any good.

At the end of the day, you can't do a copy of somebody.

I have never emulated any star or celebrity completely, and I hope nobody does the same of me.

If you look at any creative person's work, you can see bits and pieces of their influences. That's what an artist does.

There's nothing new, even 'new' is inspired by something. We're all, either consciously or unconsciously, we're inspired.