Ze Frank Quotes

Artists should never look at pictures, but should stutter in a language of their own.

I feel like there's no real innovation in having some music. It's more just unique personalities and unique expressions, and you being able to tell your story.

While one should always study the method of a great artist, one should never imitate his manner. The manner of an artist is essentially individual, the method of an artist is absolutely universal. The first personality, which no one should copy.

You've got to concentrate on the business of entertaining and writing songs. Always think different from the next person. Don't ever do a song as you heard somebody else do it.

The creative phase of an idea coincides with the period during which it insists, cantankerously, on its boundaries, on what makes it different; but an idea becomes false and impotent when it seeks reconciliation, at cut-rate prices, with other ideas.

If you copy then it is not self-expression.

If you copy, it means you're working without any real feeling. No two people on earth are alike, and it's got to be that way in music or it isn't music.

The music I make, I'm different.

Sometimes you find your voice by trying to write like people, and sometimes you find it by trying to write unlike people.

I always strive to make my music unique.

If you can't imitate him, don't copy him.

The way I work is not the way that you work, and the whole point of any creative act is that. What I have to offer is me, what you have to offer is you, and if you offer yourself with authenticity and generosity I will be moved.

You can’t learn your craft by copying me or anyone else. I hope what I do can do is in some way inspire others but I would be appalled if I thought my work was being studied as ‘the right way to do the job’. My way is just one of an infinite number of ways to do the job.

To live is to express, and to express you have to create. Creation is never merely repetition. To live is to express oneself freely in creation.

An artist must be very careful not to look for models. As soon as one artist takes another as model, he is lost. There is no other point of departure than reality.

We are living in a world where the individual must learn to command the raw materials of expression. He must not be dependent all the time on the ready-made, the finished product. It's the transferring, the changing of the raw into what is the expression of your own self – the whole joy and satisfaction and frustration of life is built into this.

When everyone starts sounding the same, that's when you know the words and phrases have become clichés. Instead of speaking in clichés, I encourage people just to be themselves, let their passion burn brightly, and go work on things they love spending their time on.

Originality is only variation.

It is a poor wit who lives by borrowing the words, decisions, mien, inventions and actions of others.

The imitator dooms himself to hopeless mediocrity. The inventor did it because it was natural to him, and so in him it has a charm. In the imitator something else is natural, and he bereaves himself of his own beauty, to come short of another man's.

I say, play your own way. Don't play what the public want - you play what you want and let the public pick up on what you doing - even if it does take them fifteen, twenty years.

I only do what I do. For me, it is a craft. It's got to be my own thing - otherwise, I would never be successful. I could easily go to the archives and pull 1987 or 1991 collection by Calvin Klein. But when you look in there, you realize that it was never about one piece. It was about the collections as bodies of work.

To idealize: all writing is a campaign against cliché. Not just clichés of the pen but clichés of the mind and clichés of the heart.

What you have felt and thought will by itself invent a new style, so that when people talk about style they are always a little astonished at the newness of it, because they think that it is only style that they are talking about, when what they are talking about is the attempt to express a new idea with such force that it will have the originality of the thought.It is an awfully lonesome business, and, as you know, I never wanted you to go into it, but if you are going into it at all, I want you to go into it knowing the sort of things that took me years to learn.

Imitation always stinks. When I take photos, I don't go back. I don't look at the past. I'm always original.