Neymar has been an idol of mine since childhood. I've always tried to mirror myself in the way he plays, and I've also tried imitating some of his haircuts.
I definitely went through this whole phase of seeing what my seniors or friends would be wearing and just copying that.
If you take my stuff apart, you'll find my choruses of repetitions are picked up almost verbatim from Kurt Vonnegut, and my distanced fracture quality is all from Amy Hempel, who's probably my favourite writer.
Yeah, I grew a goatee, and the next year, everybody had them.
When I try to sound like the contemporary sound, it never turns out that way.
I think there are some writers - like, if you read Kerouac, I think you probably need to take a little break before you sit down to the typewriter because he's the type of writer whose voice infects you.
Hemingway sucks. If I set out to write that way, it would have been been hollow and lifeless because it wasn't me.
Of the female black authors, I really like Morrison's early books a lot. But she's really become so much a clone of Faulkner. He did it better.
It is not the how of painting but the why. To imitate a style would be a little like teaching a tone of voice or a personality.
If you want to be a writer, you have to learn to write in other people's voices until you get the chance to write in your own.
If you look back to a picture of me when I was 12 years old, you will probably see me in a leather jacket trying to look like Elvis!
Steven Wright can do Steven Wright very well. Not everyone can do Steven Wright's jokes with the same results.
I'm very easily influenced, and I'm also a quick study, so I think when I decided I wanted to write pop songs, I literally just listened to pop radio for six months to get a feel for it and understand it.
I have been robbed of three million dollars all told. Everyone today is playing my stuff and I don't even get credit. Kansas City style, Chicago style, New Orleans style hell, they're all Jelly Roll style.
They can bite, but cannot be us, They can come and pick up little slang but cannot see us, You ought to be ashamed trying to fit in my adidas, So Run like DMC like you don't know you got no heater
I might say that what amateurs call a style is usually only the unavoidable awkwardnesses in first trying to make something that has not heretofore been made. Almost no new classics resemble other previous classics. At first people see only the awkwardness. Then they are not so perceptible. When they show so very awkwardly people think these awkwardnesses are the style and many copy them. This is regrettable.
A man always writes absolutely well whenever he writes in his own manner, but the wigmaker who tries to write like Gellert ... writes badly.
You can't duplicate me. A lot of fighters come out with a certain amount of style, and I like to see that, but they get smashed up a little bit.
I like to think I'm writing in the tradition of Raymond Chandler, although I don't ape his style.
We knew of Sartre and we dressed like the French existentialists. Our philosophy then, and remember we were only little kids, was more in following their looks than their thoughts. We were going around looking moody.
The great thing is anytime you see an artist that has a piece of what I've already done, you can see it from afar. 'He's doing that lil' hammer right there' - whether it's the energy, the swag or the look - it's a blessing.
I used to dress like Roger Taylor when I was ten because I thought he was cool. In high school, I used to dress like Stephen Perkins from Jane's Addiction because I thought he was cool. You just want to be those guys when you're that age.
I'ma sound like all your favorite rappers.
A terrific exercise is to take a paragraph of someone's writing who has a really strong style, and using their structure, substitute your own words for theirs, and see how they achieved their effects.
Nobody is original anymore. Nobody has any original style.
