Vincent Cassel Quotes

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

We all borrow and steal and copy from each other, and that's the way I think people get inspired.

Lesser artists borrow, great artists steal.

Twelve years on sets watching directors, I've taken a bit from everybody and rejected a lot.

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.

Most of us don't invent ideas. We take the best ideas from someone else.

Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.

It is quite annoying that we have to change the sound we invented just to avoid sounding like people who simply copy us, but... it is flattering and of course challenging.

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.

Stanley Kubrick was a big inspiration. People accuse me of never using my own material. But when did Kubrick? You look at his films and they are completely unique... completely separate entities.

It's intimidating any time to have a piece of art that someone else created, and that person says, 'Let's see what you created based on what I created.'

Making an authentic film about anything is difficult.

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

All art is theft.

Sometimes, I think filmmakers grab too much from real life.

You got to be able to reinvent yourself and come up with new ideas because everybody is going to try to copy, which is what you want. You want people to start saying what you say.

Bad writers have influences. Good writers steal.

A lot of people go, "I'm influenced by the Beatles and Zeppelin," and they just sound like a karaoke.

... the genius never makes anything new, but always something that is just different, and the average talents provide him the possibility within which his genius condenses into achievements.

Our country, customs, laws, our ambitions, and our notions of fit and fair-all these we never made; we found them ready-made; we but quote from them. What would remain to me if this art of appropriation were derogatory to genius? Every one of my writings has been furnished to me by a thousand different persons, a thousand things; wise and foolish have brought me, without suspecting it, the offering of their thoughts, faculties, and experience. My work is an aggregation of beings taken from the whole of nature. It bears the name of Goethe.

I think it's important to be aware of different people's styles and how you adapt or change or steal their ideas.

I don't care anymore if people dress like me, now I want them to think like me.

I'm going to work with Dan Clowes. After Charlie Kaufman, it's hard to fill up the gap. It's hard to find somebody who... A lot of writers, I can clearly see the desire of succeeding before the desire of expressing themselves. Sometimes people get upset when you want to be different. You were talking about "whimsical," which is a nice word. But sometimes they use the word "quirky" in the pejorative sense. I get frustrated, because they feel like I'm doing whatever I want, and there is no ground, and I don't really care. They feel it's cynical. But I don't think I have any cynicism in me.

One painter ought never to imitate the manner of any other; because in that case he cannot be called the child of nature, but the grandchild. It is always best to have recourse to nature, which is replete with such abundance of objects, than to the productions of other masters, who learnt everything from her.

I don't believe in originality in art. I think we exist on this earth to inspire each other, through our actions, through our deeds, and through who we are. We're always borrowing.