Originality Challenge Quotes

When I started writing about vampires, I swore that I wouldn't touch the 'Dracula' legend because it's been done too many times.

Not only every great poet, but every genuine, but lesser poet, fulfils once for all some possibility of language, and so leaves one possibility less for his successors.

Don't be too precious about your craft... there's only 26 letters and 12 notes, and Shakespeare and Beethoven said it all better than any of us ever will

Every cool riff has already been written by Black Sabbath. You're either playing it faster or slower or backwards, but they wrote it first.

I did not feel I could create a more beautiful or interesting Mars than Kim Stanley Robinson or Greg Bear had, so I turned my attention elsewhere.

It's so hard to do anything that doesn't owe some kind of debt to what Stanley Kubrick did with music in movies. Inevitably, you're going to end up doing something that he's probably already done before. It always seem like we're falling behind whatever he came up with. "Singin' in the Rain" (1952) in "A Clockwork Orange" (1971) - that was the first time I became so aware of music in movies. So no matter how hard you try to do something new, you're always following behind.

I think that every artist dreams of renewing the forms which came before, but I think very few can be considered to have achieved that. We are all dwarves standing upon the shoulders of the giants who preceded us, and I think we must never forget that. After all, even iconoclasts only exist with respect to that which they destroy.

The truth is, there are probably eight more 'Snow White' scripts floating around out there. And once one 'Snow White' script got hot, other people started pulling out their 'Snow White' scripts.

There's material that I read that I fall in love with, and I always get a little bit sad because I know that, when I fall in love with it, almost everyone else is falling in love with that same piece. Getting the crack at doing that thing that, in my soul, I know I have to do it, that's the role.