Feist Quotes

I think all comics borrow from each other. Only a few have an original voice, and I wasn't one of them. In the end, I couldn't figure out who to steal from, so I stopped doing it.

If I think about the writers I love or might be influenced by, I can't write at all, so I pretend there aren't any.

The moment you start thinking about what other people and other artists think, you're going to start writing like other people.

I don't listen to film music at all. I don't want to be influenced.

A young painter who cannot liberate himself from the influence of past generations is digging his own grave.

I wish I could write well enough to write about aircraft. Faulkner did it very well in Pylon but you cannot do something someone else has done though you might have done it if they hadn't.

It keeps me moving when I see people doing stuff that I see as "my" direction. I think, "Oh, it's been tainted. Now I've got to do something new." There's nothing worse than working on your own stuff and thinking that someone else is following you along.

I did what most writers do at their beginnings: emulated my elders, imitated my peers, thus turning away from any possibility of discovering truths beneath my skin and behind my eye.

It's been very important throughout my career that I've met all the guys I've copied, because at each stage they've said, 'Don't play like me, play like you.'

I almost feel like its an obligation to not further the status quo if you become somebody with influence and exposure. I dont want to paint the same painting again. I dont want to make the same sculpture again. Why shouldnt a big movie studio be able to make those small independent kinds of pictures? Why not change it up?

Though I am never exactly "blocked" I do have difficult periods. I am led by a fascination with material - the challenge of presenting it in an original and engaging way. I have no problem imagining stories, characters, distinctive settings & themes - but the difficulty is choosing a voice & a language in which to present it.

Minor artists borrow, great ones steal.

Nobody needs a movie to give them an idea.

Wow, I wish I could have done something like that.” That’s the thing, with other filmmakers, if I like them I just feel admiration. And yes, I usually say, “I wish I could have been part of that creative process,” because the films I admire like that are so specific that I know the creative process is also so specific, it’s nothing you could just imitate.

The key question isn't "What fosters creativity?" But why in God's name isn't everyone creative? Where was the human potential lost? How was it crippled? I think therefore a good question might not be why do people create? But why do people not create or innovate? We have got to abandon that sense of amazement in the face of creativity, as if it were a miracle that anybody created anything.

I just try to be myself and not conform to something I'm not and just continue doing what I do. I just try not to think about the fact that I'm an inspiration for people.

A writer does not own words any more than a painter owns colors. So lets dispense with this originality fetish… Look, listen and transcribe and forget about being original.

Delsarte tells me that Mozart stole outrageously from Galuppi, in the same way, I suppose, that Molière stole from anybody anywhere, if he found something work taking. I said that what was Mozart had not been stolen from Galuppi, or from anyone else for that matter.

Some brains are barren grounds, that will not bring seed or fruit forth, unless they are well manured with the old wit which is raked from other writers and speakers.

Nothing really came, everything was like inspired by something.

Eventually you'll take the phrases and rhythm patterns you've copped and begin to put your own mark on them

It was always hard to find stories that I felt were, in and of themselves, fresh enough and intriguing enough .

You make something. You give up expressing and start inventing.

When we are exalted by ideas, we do not owe this to Plato, but to the idea, to which also Plato was debtor.

I have no shame in making music that maybe, if you listen to it long enough, you'll realize you've heard this or that part of it before.