Unoriginal Work Quotes

If it looks like art, chances are it's somebody else's art.

For creators, especially for me as a composer, I am sure for singers also, it is sad. It is not exciting that we have to create something that someone else has already done before.

When I was 7 years old, I plagiarized, word for word, stories from science fiction magazines so my teachers would think I was smart.

Most so-called writers keep writing and writing with the hope, some day, to find something to say.

Doing a remake is an open admission that, 'boss, I don't have anything of my own.'

I have seen books made of things neither studied nor ever understood ... the author contenting himself for his own part, to have cast the plot and projected the design of it, and by his industry to have bound up the fagot of unknown provisions; at least the ink and paper his own. This may be said to be a buying or borrowing, and not a making or compiling of a book.

Studios are often very nervous of things they don't recognize, by which I mean things that haven't been done before, and therefore, they take a really original idea, and they recognize the originality, and then they try and make it look like something they recognize. So they try to turn it into something far more procedural.

Am I overjoyed when somebody says, 'Oh, we're going to do another Jane Austen?' No - because there's never anything in it for me.

It has come to be practically a sort of rule in literature that a man, having once shown himself capable of original writing, is entitled thenceforth to steal from the writings of others at discretion.

Every poor designer can go with things that are popular at the moment.

I've literally been in sessions with producers, writing for other people, and they're like, 'We need a song for this artist, and we need it to sound like this song.' They're literally saying, 'Rip off this song that was no. 1 last week,' and that's just so uninspiring.

They put it on the page because it sounded good or it looked good or they read it in a book somewhere that this is how you structure a script or something, and they just don't get it. It's surprising.

People get caught up in recreating something, and that actually hurts the genre of music because there's nothing new.

As soon as you think, 'Pirates are really popular right now with kids so I'm going to write a pirate movie'... that's when you're dead.

I wrote three mysteries and then a contemporary spy novel that was unbelievably derivative - completely based on 'The Conversation,' the movie with Gene Hackman. Amazingly, the character in the book looks exactly like... Gene Hackman.

I am the literary equivalent of a Big Mac and fries.

Most books today seemed to have been written overnight from books read the day before.

It's often disappointing when you're sent scripts, and you see why you were sent it; they want you to repeat the same thing you've done before.

The idea of devoting two years of my life to making a corporate product that looks and smells and tastes like a lot of other things out there with just a different trademark character is a bore.

I thought of Jeff Bridges in 'Hell or High Water' and Ben Foster, and I kept trying very hard not to, because you're terrified you're going to write this thing that then feeds specifically to this one person that then won't do it.