Quotes & Sayings About Copying Someone Else

Being a cover artist is not like being a real artist. That's just copying what someone else did. — Sebastian Bach

Being yourself is the meat and potatoes of mothering, and if you are forever copying someone else's way you are apt to lose touch with your own truth. — Janet P. Penley

Do you want to be crazy, radical, insanely different than everybody else and do something few people have the courage to do? Then try being yourself and walk a mile or two in your own shoes. Stop trying to be something you are not. Stop trying to emulate someone else. Trust me ... they are probably just copying another person they think is cool. No one else will ever be able to duplicate how perfectly you personify yourself. Here is your chance to amaze the world with how different you can be. — H.L. Stephens

From seaport to seaport, papers accumulate on the captain's desk. "Paperwork has become the bane of this job," he says. "If a ship doesn't have a good copying machine, it isn't seaworthy. The more ports, the more papers. South American paperwork is worse than the paperwork anywhere else in the world but the Arab countries and Indonesia." Deliberately, he allows the pile on his desk to rise until a deep roll on a Pacific swell throws it to the deck and scatters it from bulkhead to bulkhead. This he interprets as a signal that the time has come to do paperwork. The paper carpet may be an inch deep, but he leaves it where it fell. Bending over, he picks up one sheet. He deals with it: makes an entry, writes a letter - does whatever it requires him to do. Then he bends over and picks up another sheet. This goes on for a few days until, literally, he has cleared his deck. The — John McPhee

We always worry that we are copying someone else, that we don't have our own style. Don't worry. Writing is a communal act. Contrary to popular belief, a writer is not Prometheus alone on a hill full of fire. We are very arrogant to think we alone have a totally original mind. We are carried on the backs of all the writers who came before us. We live in the present with all the history, ideas, and soda pop of this time. It all gets mixed up in our writing. — Natalie Goldberg

I didn't want to feel like I was mimicking or copying someone else's performance, whether it's subconscious or not. — Aidan Turner

Copying isn't particularly creative work. Being inspired by someone else's idea to produce something new and different IS creative work. — Shia Labeouf

If a spectacle is going to be particularly imposing I prefer to see it through somebody else's eyes, because that man will always exaggerate. Then I can exaggerate his exaggeration, and my account of the thing will be the most impressive. — Mark Twain

David Lynch is very important to me, and he does dreamlike movies, but my dreams are not like David Lynch's dreams. I have no interest in copying anybody's work. It would never occur to me to want this to look like someone else's thing. — Charlie Kaufman

... [Changers] were a threat to identity, a challenge to the individualism even of those they were never likely to impersonate. It had nothing to do with souls or physical or spiritual possession; it was, as the Idirans well understood, the behavouristic copying of another which revolted. Individuality, the thing which most humans held more precious than anything else about themselves, was somehow cheapened by the ease with which a Changer could ignore it as a limitation and use it as a disguise. — Iain Banks

THE MOCKINGBIRD All summer the mockingbird in his pearl-gray coat and his white-windowed wings flies from the hedge to the top of the pine and begins to sing, but it's neither lilting nor lovely, for he is the thief of other sounds - whistles and truck brakes and dry hinges plus all the songs of other birds in his neighborhood; mimicking and elaborating, he sings with humor and bravado, so I have to wait a long time for the softer voice of his own life to come through. He begins by giving up all his usual flutter and settling down on the pine's forelock then looking around as though to make sure he's alone; then he slaps each wing against his breast, where his heart is, and, copying nothing, begins easing into it as though it was not half so easy as rollicking, as though his subject now was his true self, which of course was as dark and secret as anyone else's, and it was too hard - perhaps you understand - to speak or to sing it to anything or anyone but the sky. — Mary Oliver

When you're young, you obviously have people you look up to. People like Andrew Oldham and Nile Rodgers inspired me then, and they inspire me now. But at some point, you start to try to be the best you can be and you're not copying anybody else. I'm just doing it in public, and my work needs to reflect that as well. — Johnny Marr

I think you can have moderate success by copying something else, but if you really want to knock it out of the park, you have to do something different and take chances. — Lee Ann Womack

God never uses one approach to the get his job done in the world. Each soul has its own way of being reached. He has put inside of each of us an unique song, that only another heart can hear clearly. To wish you were someone else robs another human being of the special blessings, talents and gifts God meant for you to share. — Shannon L. Alder