149 Quotes About Imitation

You were born an original work of art. Stay original.

An original is worth more than a copy.

Anybody who is imitating somebody else, no matter who it us, is heading in the wrong direction. It is impossible to become like somebody else. Your only hope is to become more fully yourself.

People can copy anything; your mode of dressing, the way you talk, walk, dance, sing, cry, but they will find it very hard to imitate the way you donate money.

Above all things -- read. Read the great stylists who cannot be copied rather than the successful writers who must not be copied.

It was the doomed competition with photography that had led painting to lose its ways in the mindless transcription of reality. Admittedly the scorn for realism had been a traditional theme of premodern art theory, often mapped onto onto a geographic distinction. The direct imitation of reality was the northern European weakness, a limitation to be countered by an idealism cultivated in the Mediterranean realm.

The expression of personality in art had been sought after and appreciated long before anyone had realized that art was based no longer on an objective What but on a subjective How. Long after it had become a self-confession, people still continued to talk about the objective truth in art, although it was precisely the self-expressionism in art which enabled it to win through to general recognition.

An original writer is not one who imitates nobody, but one whom nobody can imitate.

But once an original book has been written-and no more than one or two appear in a century-men of letters imitate it, in other words, they copy it so that hundreds of thousands of books are published on exactly the same theme, with slightly different titles and modified phraseology. This should be able to be achieved by apes, who are essentially imitators, provided, of course, that they are able to make use of language.