To refrain from imitation is the best revenge.

What constitutes a real, live human being is more of a mystery than ever these days, and men each one of whom is a valuable, unique experiment on the part of nature are shot down wholesale.

I am not influenced by the techniques or fashions of any other motion picture company.

Every band I’ve worked with also wants to be countercultural in the sense that they want to feel that they’ve gone somewhere that nobody else has been.

I’ve always felt that what I have going for me is not my imagination, because everyone has an imagination. What I have is a relentlessly controlled imagination. What looks like wild invention is actually quite carefully calculated.

Those who do not want to imitate anything, produce nothing.

You stand out in the crowd only because you have these many, many carrying you on their shoulders.

If you want to talk about something new, you have to make up a new kind of language.

The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge natural to party dissension, which in different ages and countries has perpetrated the most horrid enormities, is itself a frightful despotism. But this leads at length to a more formal and permanent despotism.

Human language appears to be a unique phenomenon, without significant analogue in the animal world.

I am just one human being.

I’m very free-spirited.

I am not happy, and the quest for happiness as a principal objective is not part of my world. Of course, ever since I can remember, I have done what I felt like doing.

If you can’t beat them, arrange to have them beaten.

Today you are you! That is truer than true! There is no one alive who is you-er than you!

Our diversity is our strength. What a dull and pointless life it would be if everyone was the same.

If you keep proving stuff that others have done, getting confidence, increasing the complexities of your solutions – for the fun of it – then one day you’ll turn around and discover that nobody actually did that one!

I periodically realize every few years that the only person whose taste I really trust is me.

Avoid popularity if you would have peace.

An eye for an eye only leads to more blindness.

I think everyone’s inherently snobbish. Things that are very popular are not taken seriously, because the snobbish side of one says, ‚Well, if everyone likes it it can’t be that good.‘ Whereas if only I and a couple of other people like it, then it must be really something special.

Everyone is different. Everyone has different teams they’ve played on, coaches they’ve played for.

Even if you are a minority of one, the truth is the truth.

Freedom is relative.

People gonna be they own individuals and have they own worlds and I can’t knock it.

Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others.

How lucky Adam was. He knew when he said a good thing, nobody had said it before.

It never mattered to me that people in school didn’t think that country music was cool, and they made fun of me for it – though it did matter to me that I was not wearing the clothes that everybody was wearing at that moment. But at some point, I was just like, ‚I like wearing sundresses and cowboy boots.‘

A musician should only sound like what they do, and no two musicians sound the same. It’s an individual-feel thing, you know?

In order to be an immaculate member of a flock of sheep, one must above all be a sheep oneself.

I am attracted to people who make this effort in knowing what suits them – they are individual and stylish.

These things bring you to reality as to how fragile you are; at the same moment you are doing something that nobody else is able to do. The same moment that you are seen as the best, the fastest and somebody that cannot be touched, you are enormously fragile.

I am what time, circumstance, history, have made of me, certainly, but I am also, much more than that. So are we all.

It is a rare mind indeed that can render the hitherto non-existent blindingly obvious. The cry ‚I could have thought of that‘ is a very popular and misleading one, for the fact is that they didn’t, and a very significant and revealing fact it is too.

The snow goose need not bathe to make itself white. Neither need you do anything but be yourself.

A lot of people have said I’d have probably done better in my career if I hadn’t looked so cheap and gaudy. But I dress to be comfortable for me, and you shouldn’t be blamed because you want to look pretty.

The only really committed artist is he who, without refusing to take part in the combat, at least refuses to join the regular armies and remains a freelance.

People ask me where I got my singing style. I didn’t copy my style from anybody.

There’s no formula.

To become ‚unique,‘ the challenge is to fight the hardest battle which anyone can imagine until you reach your destination.

The poet, being an imitator like a painter or any other artist, must of necessity imitate one of three objects – things as they were or are, things as they are said or thought to be, or things as they ought to be. The vehicle of expression is language – either current terms or, it may be, rare words or metaphors.

People have so many hang-ups about how other people live their lives. People always want to keep you in a little box, or they need to label you and fix you in time and location.

The worst thing I can be is the same as everybody else. I hate that.

After winning, most teams become individuals; most teams become complacent.

The false is nothing but an imitation of the true.

I’ve never been one to sit back and go, ‚I’d better do what the audience wants me to do, because I don’t want to lose them.‘

Imperfection is beauty, madness is genius and it’s better to be absolutely ridiculous than absolutely boring.

Every new opinion, at its starting, is precisely in a minority of one.

If two men agree on everything, you may be sure that one of them is doing the thinking.

I talk about myself in the third person all the time. I don’t live my life in the way someone like you does. I live my life completely serving only my work and my fans.

I am the astronaut of boxing. Joe Louis and Dempsey were just jet pilots. I’m in a world of my own.

You don’t need anybody to tell you who you are or what you are. You are what you are!

This soul, or life within us, by no means agrees with the life outside us. If one has the courage to ask her what she thinks, she is always saying the very opposite to what other people say.

The bad gains respect through imitation, the good loses it especially in art.

To be angry is to revenge the faults of others on ourselves.

There isn’t anybody that looks like me without clothes on.

The world is put back by the death of every one who has to sacrifice the development of his or her peculiar gifts to conventionality.

What you are, you are by accident of birth; what I am, I am by myself. There are and will be a thousand princes; there is only one Beethoven.

Maybe every city has a unique sensibility, but we don’t have names for what they are or haven’t identified them all. We can’t pinpoint exactly what makes each city’s people unique yet.

Never do things others can do and will do if there are things others cannot do or will not do.

All art is but imitation of nature.