Rules are what the artist breaks; the memorable never emerged from a formula.
There's a million people who can go out and play the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto brilliantly, but we're the only ones who can do 'A Little Nightmare Music.'
What I have to do is utilize as best I can the ideas which objects suggest to me, connect, fuse, and color in my way the shadows they cast within me, illumine them from the inside. And since of necessity my vision is quite different from that of the next man, my painting will interpret things in an entirely different manner even though it makes use of the same elements.
It's the subject matter that counts. I'm interested in revealing the subject in a new way to intensify it. A photo is able to capture a moment that people can't always see.
Words are the instruments you play to the song of your ideas, you're just playing covers.
I want everyone to wear what they want and mix it in their own way. That, to me, is what is modern.
The beauty of music is that everyone hears it their own way, and every song you hear leaves an impression on you that alters the way you hear everything from that point on.
Where there is no style, there is in effect no point of view. There is, essentially, no anger, no conviction, no self. Style is opinion, hung washing, the caliber of a bullet, teething beads.
Everything you see or hear or experience in any way at all is specific to you. You create a universe by perceiving it, so everything in the universe you perceive is specific to you.
People who understand music hear sounds that no one else makes when Frank Sinatra sings.
If you let other people's vision get between the world and your own, you will achieve that extremely common and worthless thing, a pictorial photograph.
Life … is a bit like reading. … If all your responses to a book have already been duplicated and expanded upon by a professional critic, then what point is there to your reading? Only that it’s yours. Similarly, why live your life? Because it’s yours. But what if such an answer becomes less and less convincing?
Originality is only variation.
Fashion is not public opinion, or the result of embodiment of public opinion. It may be that public opinion will condemn the shape of a bonnet, as it may venture to do always, and with the certainty of being right nine times in ten: but fashion will place it upon the head of every woman in America; and, were it literally a crown of thorns, she would smile contentedly beneath the imposition.
Every actor and actress is possessed of the absorbing passion to create something distinctive and unique.
What is originality? To see something that is as yet without a name, that is as yet impossible to designate, even though it staresus in the face. The way it usually is with people, it is a thing's name that makes it perceptible to them in the first place.--For the most part, the original ones have also been the name-givers.
No two directors make the same film the same way.
Art only begins where Imitation ends.
What is style? For many people, a very complicated way of saying very simple things. According to us, a very simple way of saying very complicated things.
Imitation has to be avoided. Understanding should be the only law, never imitation.
No idea is original, there's nothing new under the sun, it's never what you do, but how it's done
And what is Genius but finer love, a love impersonal, a love of the flower and perfection of things, and a desire to draw a new picture or copy of the same? It looks to the cause and life: it proceeds from within outward, whilst Talent goes from without inward.
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.
I can only sing songs my way. I don't know any other way.
I think that it was a great advantage to go into photography not knowing much about it. Not thinking. I think one of the problems with many photographers today is that they never see for themselves, but just like everybody else.
