A Quote by Pharrell Williams

If someone asks me what inspires me, I always say, "That which is missing," because I don't want to copy everything that's already happening. I feel like when you copy, you blend in, and when you blend in, you get lost.
Start copying what you love. Copy copy copy copy. At the end of the copy you will find your self.
What we look for when we need to find someone who can fit in with our music, the vocals and the harmonies and the way they blend are very important to us because if you listen to Beach Boys music, the harmonies, not only are the notes being sung, but there's a blend to it. The voices have to blend.
If you look at items of clothing like denim or polo shirts, they came from someone else's idea and everyone now makes them, but even so, I sometimes want to buy into the newer thing because it looks good or whatever. I mean, I copy many things - almost everything I do could be called a copy in some way. But I copy with a certain respect. I have a high regard for the original, and so I want to put my twist onto that. It's just like sampling music - when it's done well, the new work communicates a respect for the original source material.
For six months I couldn't sleep. With insomnia, nothing's real. Everything is far away. Everything is a copy of a copy of a copy.
Then you see something like the Gucci advertising and you're like, "Yes!" It gives you confidence because you feel like you're not alone - you don't have to copy it but you can find inspiration. It's not only Gucci; I feel like everything is moving quickly and there's a lot of excitement and turmoil around these designers leaving their brands, but it feels like it's buzzing. There's stuff happening and I feel like it's always exciting when there's movement.
We buy a copy of 'Gravity's Rainbow,' say, and we carry our copy home. We open it; we fall into it. And it is here that the word 'copy' fails. Because what I experience when I read 'Gravity's Rainbow,' or 'Beloved,' or 'The Moviegoer,' is not at all a 'copy' of what you experience when you read the same novel.
I get nostalgic for things that didn't really exist. I might have a cassette from the first time a Melle Mel track, say, got played on radio in Manchester. And it might be a copy of a copy of a copy of a tape and there's all these weird nuances and distortions that have affected what I know as the truth, if you like, of that track.
I'm just me. I'm that cool girl who - as I like to say, I have that Carson Daly effect, where, if you watched 'TRL,' he was able to do interviews with NSYNC, blend right in, and then he would do interviews with Cash Money and blend in there, and you just naturally liked him.
Philip Glass once told me, "They can always copy what you've done, but they can't copy what you're going to do."
Never copy yourself, always copy someone else.
Alexander Liberman was very smart, very elegant. At the end, he didn't have much patience with me because I was a young, anxious, nervous photographer. I worried that I was copying too many other people. And he said, "It's all right to copy people, as long as the people you copy are good and you copy them well."
I think the worst thing you can do is blend in. Why would you ever want to blend in?
Some in Europe take a plane, fly to Silicon Valley, visit and look and come back and say we need to do the same thing. Well you can copy others... but if you always copy others, you never get ahead.
If your entire conception of what's possible in fantasy only comes from other fantasy books, you're going to go on to create a copy of a copy of a copy. There's nothing original there, nothing dynamic. Which is fine if that's your goal, but I've always wanted to do something no one else was doing before.
This is how it is with insomnia. Everything is so far away, a copy of a copy of a copy. The insomnia distance of everything, you can't touch anything and nothing can touch you.
You've always got to have the right blend of colour. You'd be silly to match a yellow t-shirt with a light green pair of trousers, you know? You can wear different colours at the same time, and as long as they blend with each other then it works. That's what I like.
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