Cory Barlog Quotes

When starting a project, your influences are the things around you. It doesn't mean you have to sound like it or look like it or anything. It's just something new, and your curiosity becomes enthralled by it.

Lesser artists borrow, great artists steal.

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

When I take from my influences, it's rare that I do it literally.

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

Any creator owes a debt to past creation.

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.

If an artist may say nothing except what he has invented by his own sole efforts, it stands to reason he will be poor in ideas. If he could take what he wants wherever he could find it, as Euripides and Dante and Michelangelo and Shakespeare and Bach were free, his larder would always be full, and his cookery might be worth tasting.

Someone very smart once said to me, "Steal, don't borrow." So if there's anything good in anything anyone else does, it's fair game. I think that everything I've ever done at some point is part of someone else's legacy.

The poet is he who inspires, rather than he who is inspired.

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

But inspiration? - That's when you come home from abroad and are asked: Well, have you found inspiration? - and fortunately you haven't. But the impressions sink in, of course, and may emerge later: None of us has invented the house; that was done many thousands of years ago.

You'd have to be completely crazy not to be influenced by and take from other artists. It's completely impossible not to.

Originality is nothing but judicious imitation. The most original writers borrowed one from another.

I try to write like the writers I admire - I rip them off in form. It comes from George Strait and Merle Haggard records, and country music in general is really good at that, the twisted phrase... So I'm always looking for that angle in my own work.

I take stuff because I'm inspired by it.

Good artists copy, great artists steal.

Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.

If you look at the most meaningful science fiction, it didn't come from watching other films. We seem to be in a place now where filmmakers make films based on other films because that's where the stimuli and influence comes from.

You cannot possibly invent painting all by yourself.

I think we always move from imitation to assimilation to innovation, but I can't name you 20 people outside those we've already recognized who ever got to point three: innovation.

We Americans love original ideas. But truly, there are already plenty of good ones out there, ours for the taking. If I were too proud to copy the ideas of others, I likely wouldn't have even a fraction of my current success.

Originality is the fine art of remembering what you hear but forgetting where you heard it.

I borrow bits from everyone.

Sometimes I'm more inspired by stuff that tells a story and less inspired by stuff that's not a natural extension of what I'm already doing.