A Quote by Jonathan Lethem

When people call something "original," 9 out of 10 times they just don't know the references or original sources involved.

Jonathan Lethem

Quote Topics

Call Involved Just Know Original Out People References Something Sources Times

Quote Author

Jonathan Lethem
American - Novelist
Born: February 19, 1964

We now live in a world both in film and television where everything is based on something. You point out, "Star Wars" was an original screenplay, "Raiders of the Lost Ark," an original screenplay, "Ghostbusters" an original screenplay, "Back to the Future." All these things that people love were original ideas many years ago.

Alfred Gough

Very few people are original. There's very little original anything out there. Because to be original means you have to stand alone.

Susan Powter

The way I make art - the way a lot of people make art - is as an extension of language and communication, where references are incredibly important. It's about making a work that is inspired by something preexisting but changes it to have a new value and meaning that doesn't in any way take away from the original - and, in fact, might provide the original with a second life or a new audience.

Shepard Fairey

An original something, dear maid, you would wish me to write; but how shall I begin? For I'm sure I have not original in me, Excepting Original Sin.

Thomas Campbell

You know, there's an economy in lyric-writing that doesn't afford you, or at least me - I usually start off with nine or 10 verses and then boil it down to two or three that are half the length of the original verses. I think for me it's about what you leave out [rather] than what you put in. I'm not sure that the songs help me figure anything out so much as they're a distillation of the original question.

J Tillman

I guess if you have an original take on life, or something about you is original, you don't have to study people who came before you. You don't have to mimic anybody. You just have a gut feeling inside, an instinct that tells you what's right for you, and you can't do it in any other way.

Barbra Streisand

If you're involved in with something that's original, you know, you'll always go back and try to rehash it.

Eddie Murphy

If you go for the money first and try to think of what other people want to see, you change your original inspiration and perhaps put out something that's less original and less personal and maybe less satisfying.

John Cameron Mitchell

If you listen to old Jerry Lee Lewis records, he'll always - about nine times out of 10 have the lyrics different than the original record is.

Chris Isaak

I love hanging out with my friends and family. I really, really, really love articulating original thought. That's probably my core, my biggest buzz. Because then it makes me feel like I know why I was born. Reaching original thought, where I know that I'm perceiving something that only I have seen, and I need to incarnate that. That's it right there.

Caroline Myss

I'm not original, but I strive toward it as much as possible. I tried really hard on Weekend Update to do something that I considered original, which was, I tried to cut all cleverness out of the joke.

Norm MacDonald

I probably have the most fun thinking up original vehicles. I usually consider details such as how to get into them and where their engines are. When you draw a real-world car, you have to obtain some references. I'd hate to have someone point out that I'm wrong. But if it's something I invented, I can have it my way.

Akira Toriyama

You have to be as original as possible. It's a tough thing to come up with something totally original.

Rickey Medlocke

I don't tend to be a nitpicker when I'm watching movies, so as long as something is true to the spirit of the original, that's very much what we got for. You try to never do something that the original author wouldn't have done themselves.

Jane Goldman

It's always been important to us to be original, which sounds really easy when you say it. Everyone says it all the time, but it's actually not that easy to be original. It's also something scary because if you're doing stuff that doesn't sound like anything else, I think a lot of people get scared of that. A lot of people tend to follow instead, they wait for something else to do something new and then they follow that. We just don't like to do that.