I feel responsible to make something original as a Japanese artist. There are lots of singers and guitarists, but I feel that on stage its meaningless to copy something someone has done before.
— Miyavi
Fulfilling Original And Copy quotations
History is a gallery of pictures in which there are few originals and many copies.

It is essential for genetic material to be able to make exact copies of itself;
otherwise growth would produce disorder, life could not originate, and favourable forms would not be perpetuated by natural selection.

An Internet meme is a hijacking of the original idea.
Instead of mutating by random change and spreading by a form of Darwinian selection, Internet memes are altered deliberately by human creativity. There is no attempt at accuracy of copying, as with genes - and as with memes in their original version.
I just wanted to play tennis. I started because I wanted to pick up another sport and then as I was slowly getting better I wanted to see how far I can go but I always wanted to be myself. I wanted to be original. I didn't want to copy anybody's style.
Nature, who permits no two leaves to be exactly alike, has given a still greater diversity to human minds. Imitation, then, is a double murder; for it deprives both copy and original of their primitive existence.

The more you are like yourself, the less you are like anyone else which makes you unique. The problem with most people is that they spend their lives trying to emulate others and so we have lots of copies but few originals.
No art can be grafted with success on another art.
For though they all profess the same origin, and to proceed from the same stock, yet each has its own peculiar modes both of imitating nature and of deviating from it... The deviation, more especially, will not bear transplantation to another soil.
The hills and valleys of Heaven will be to those you now experience not as a copy is to an original, nor as the substitute is to the genuine article, but as the flower to the root, or the diamond to the coal.
Pictures artists staged their own images or copied or cut out others already in existence. The viewer took them in separately, in sometimes paradoxical waves: an original image, then the manipulations of it, then the places where image and idea intersected. This created a crucial perceptual glitch that irony and understanding filled.
Everyday we just copy&paste ourselves from the previous day instead of creating a new blank page and be something different and original.
I was really crying the morning after the indication.
However I am over that now. Nevertheless, I am proud for it to be in the Rock and Roll hall of fame. But I've got two copies of the guitar now, to remind of the original Teardrop.
Competition is. In every business, no matter how small or how large, someone is just around the corner forever trying to steal your ideas and build his success out of your imagination, struggling after that which you have toiled endless years to secure, striving to outdo you in each and every way. If such a competitor would work as hard to originate as he does to copy, he would much more quickly gain success.
I originated a remark many years ago that I think has been copied more than any little thing that Ive every said, and I used it in the FOLLIES of 1922. I said America has a unique record. We never lost a war and we never won a conference in our lives. I believe that we could without any degree of egotism, single-handed lick any nation in the world. But we cant confer with Costa Rica and come home with our shirts on.
Japan's very interesting. Some people think it copies things. I don't think that anymore. I think what they do is reinvent things. They will get something that's already been invented and study it until they thoroughly understand it. In some cases, they understand it better than the original inventor.
Always think that in any area of the arts, you get maybe ten percent of people who are creative, original... and the rest are generally following on, copying.
I love The End of the Batman story. I have my original copy, the hardcover, at my house from when I was a kid, whenever that was,'88 or '89. It was very influential to me because it was so explicit in touching on the notion that Batman might be mad and that he might belong in the mad house.
We live in a world of copies and we're fascinated when we encounter the originals (in a museum, for instance).
Most people understand that sexual lust has to do with propagating genes.
Copulation in nature tends to lead to reproduction and so to more genetic copies. But in modern society, most copulations involve contraception, designed precisely to avoid reproduction. Altruism probably has origins like those of lust.
By exposing the multiplicity, the facticity, the repetition and stereotype at the heart of every aesthetic gesture, photography deconstructs the possibility of differentiating between the original and the copy. [Photography calls] into question the whole concept of the uniqueness of the art object, the originality of the author, the coherence of the oeuvre within which it was made, and the individuality of so-called self-expression.
I got like a list of things at the beginning.
There were ten things that Bryan made for each one of us, and he drew us our own personal picture of our character that was in color. And uh, I just have a copy of it, I think that they're going to do something special with the originals at the end, like presenting them to us.
Derivative writers seem versatile because they imitate many others, past and present. Artistic originality has only itself to copy.
Born originals, how comes it to pass that we die copies? That meddling ape imitation, as soon as we come to years of indiscretion, (so let me speak,) snatches the pen, and blots out nature's mark of separation, cancels her kind intention, destroys all mental individuality. The lettered world no longer consists of singulars: it is a medley, a mass; and a hundred books, at bottom, are but one.
Love is one and the same in the original; but there are a thousand different copies of it.
Keep it simple. Trust your imagination. Discover what is unique about your imagination. Don't simply read a story and copy it. I go into myself. Then I transcribe what visions I have. If those ideas are original, and you are devoted, you will go far.
When we reflect on our past sentiments and affections, our thought is a faithful mirror, and copies its objects truly; but the colours which it employs are faint and dull, in comparison of those in which our original perceptions were clothed.
I enclose to you a copy of the declaration of independence as agreed to by the House, and also, as originally framed. You will judge whether it is the better or worse for the Critics.
Not infrequently, we encounter copies of important human beings;
and here, too, as in the case of paintings, most people prefer the copies to the originals.
Recently while browsing in a secondhand bookstore I bought a paperback copy of The Intellectual and the City, but I was unable to read it. When I got home I discovered that the original owner had highlighted the entire book - literally. Every line on every page had been drawn through with a bright green Magic Marker. It was a terrifying example of a mind that had lost all power of discrimination.
I'd like to be an original, to be myself and not a pale copy of anyone else.
He that would be a master must draw from the life as well as copy from originals, and join theory and experience together.
What sometimes enrages me and always disappoints and grieves me is the preference of great schools of learning for the derivative as opposed to the original, for the conventional and thin which can be duplicated in many copies rather than the new and powerful, and for arid correctness and limitation of scope and method rather than for universal newness and beauty, wherever it may be seen.
History, it is easily perceived, is a picture-gallery containing a host of copies and very few originals.
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.
You become a leader when you decide to be an original and not a copy.