A Quote by William S. Burroughs
A writer does not own words any more than a painter owns colors. So lets dispense with this originality fetish… Look, listen and transcribe and forget about being original.
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Knowing how to paint and to use one's colors rightly has not any connection with originality. This originality consists in properly expressing your own impressions.
Hollywood. It lacks originality. Remake sucks.' But I had to look deeper into it from my own perspective. We are not trying to compete with the original at all and that's what allowed me to pull the trigger without any hesitancy.
I admire anyone who can come up with something original. But not originality alone, because there can be originality in stupidity, with no musical description of any emotion or any beauty the man has seen, or any kind of life he has lived.
I like black for clothes, small items, and jewelry. It's a color that can't be violated by any other colors. A color that simply keeps being itself. A color that sinks more somberly than any other color, yet asserts itself more than all other colors. It's a passionate gallant color. Anything is wonderful if it transcends things rather than being halfway.
By poetry we mean the art of employing of words in such a manner as to produce an illusion on the imagination; the art of doing by means of words, what the painter does by means of colors.
The playwright, along with any writer, composer, painter in this society, has got to have a terribly private view of his own value, of his own work. He's got to listen to his own voice primarily. He's got to watch out for fads, for what might be called the critical aesthetics.
I use different media, but I still think as a painter. I organize my forms and colors on a screen like a painter does on a canvas.
Writing fantasy lets me imagine a great deal more than, say, writing about alligators, and lets me write about places more distant than Florida, but I can tell you things about Florida and alligators, let you make the connection all on your own.
What makes you attractive is being yourself, being natural, being unaware. Even though makeup is important, you should do it all, and then forget about it. You don't want to look like anyone else, any more than you want to be anyone else. You want to look like you. Imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery - but it's flattering to someone else. Not to you.
Be original. That's my best advice. You're going to find that there's something that you do well, and try to do it with as much originality as you can, and don't skimp on the words. Work on the words.
You can be sure that a painter reveals himself in his work as much as and more than a writer does in his.
It is not possible to be original by trying to be original - those who attempt this in the arts will be merely avant-garde. Originality is the product of an impulse to intense and overwhelming that it bursts the conventions and produces something new - again more by accident than design.
I haven't come across any recent new ideas in film that strike me as being particularly important and that have to do with form. I think that a preoccupation with originality of form is more or less a fruitless thing. A truly original person with a truly original mind will not be able to function in the old form and will simply do something different. Others had much better think of the form as being some sort of classical tradition and try to work within it.
True translation is transparent: it does not obscure the original, does not stand in its light, but rather allows pure language, as if strengthened by its own medium, to shine even more fully on the original.
What caricature is in painting, burlesque is in writing; and in the same manner the comic writer and painter correlate to each other; as in the former, the painter seems to have the advantage, so it is in the latter infinitely on the side of the writer. For the monstrous is much easier to paint than describe, and the ridiculous to describe than paint.
Music, as long as it exists, will always take its departure from the major triad and return to it. The musician cannot escape it any more than the painter his primary colors or the architect his three dimensions.
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