Top 115 Imitate Quotes

Acting as a profession came to me by chance: in 1946, after the war, I was having lunch with my cousin, who was the Italian ambassador, and he asked, ‘What are you going to do now you’re out of uniform?’ I said, ‘I’m pretty inventive, and I can imitate people,’ and he said, ‘Have you thought about being an actor?’

Art does imitate life, it has to come from somewhere. To put boundaries and limitations on it doesn’t make a lot of sense to me.

Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.

‘American Idol’ is sometimes lumped with reality shows and it has that element – folks-next-door battling it out in a contest. But instead of fighting leeches, bugs, parasites and each other, as on CBS’s ‘Survivor’ and other shows that imitate it, the ‘American Idol’ contestants, of course, sing.

It’s not that I imitate him. I use a lot of what I feel. Even now, they refuse for me to stop doing James Brown. If it’s something I can feel from the heart and from the soul, I do it.

I’m hard to imitate because I’m not gifted enough.

Don’t imitate. Write what you know about, that has to be your goal.

When people are free to do as they please, they usually imitate each other.

When violence is real and you flinch away from it, violence does not push people to try and imitate that. Often, we shun the violence that makes us flinch, because it disturbs us. And what makes us uncomfortable and disturbs us is not often bad. What disturbs us will not make us imitate that.

I got this Christmas gift with the entire Beatles catalog. I had fun trying to duplicate what I was hearing on these records, only using the instruments I had at hand – an acoustic guitar, and that’s all. It was endlessly amusing to me to try to imitate John Lennon and Paul McCartney’s harmonies using the guitar.

I could tell you which writer’s rhythms I am imitating. It’s not exactly plagiarism, it’s falling in love with good language and trying to imitate it.

When I’m composing a scene for the first time, I try to imitate my character. The less critical distance the better – particularly when they’re acting badly.

For Zidane to say he’s impressed – well, that’s the greatest compliment! He was my role model, I just loved to see him play, and I used to try and imitate his moves when I was young. I think he was by far the best footballer of his generation.

I don’t like to analyze what I do too much, but I certainly never meet a single person and say, ‘You’re the next character.’ People think that’s what I do. They also think that I sit down and observe and try to imitate random people. I’ve never done that at all.

When I came out with ‘Posse on Broadway,’ I decided, enough with trying to imitate New York, enough with trying to imitate L.A., let’s just be Seattle. And rock, grunge, followed right after ‘Posse on Broadway’ and Seattle just exploded.

The music is something outside myself that’s also inside myself… Music and a sense of another presence always went hand in hand. Even when I was three, I would improvise music, and my maternal grandfather would act as an audience and used to applaud. I would imitate things like thunder and rain.

Example has more followers than reason. We unconsciously imitate what pleases us, and approximate to the characters we most admire.

The Russians imitate French ways, but always at a distance of fifty years.

I entreat students of letters and other scholars to obey their masters in things good, to imitate them, and diligently apply themselves to letters for the sake of God’s honour and their own salvation and that of other men.

I’ve been telling my students, ‘Imitate, imitate.’ And they say, ‘Well, what if I plagiarize, or what if I’m not original? I want to be myself.’ And I always tell them, ‘Your self will shine through’… If you allow yourself to feel deeply and honestly, what you say won’t be like anyone else.

My sisters were teenagers when I was born, so the last thing they wanted was a little nappy-headed boy running around. I would imitate them or copy things off TV.

It is only in the case of the Priestly Code that opinions differ widely; for it tries hard to imitate the costume of the Mosaic period, and, with whatever success, to disguise its own.

My style statement is to be myself! Because if you try to imitate someone else, you will end up feeling uncomfortable.

When I was a young boy, I would watch my mom apply her makeup, so one day, I took a lipstick she had and put it on my mouth, trying to imitate her. It ended up all over my face.

Our best selves tell us that ‘there but for the grace of God… ‘ and that, in the end, there is no distance, really, between us and them. It is just us. Our best and noble hope is to imitate the God we believe in. The God who has abundant room in God’s grief and heart for us all.

I began to imitate what I was reading, and I started to become a poet, even though what I was writing were not good poems.

Young players try and imitate the best players like Ronaldo. They try to imitate the hair, the clothes, the cars, the tricks. I try to tell them how hard Cristiano Ronaldo trained in training and after training. He only wanted to be the best. Everything else came after.

I think that my father would find it so confusing that people want to imitate him. Not because he didn’t have confidence in who he was, but because he never imitated anybody. He was his own person.

I was kind of an obnoxious kid. I would imitate Celine Dion. I would jump around and belt to the rafters and do the accent and everything.

Pau has a game that’s impossible to imitate. He’s so finesse and so skilled, it’s impossible to imitate. Honestly, I’m a big fan of the game. I’ve never seen a player his size who has so many moves, so many counters and it’s impossible. His length, his size, his skills – I mean, you can’t teach that.

When I did my first few television specials, my illusions were so advanced that it took a couple of years before the other illusionists could even figure out what I was doing, let alone try to imitate me.

I think Indians dress better than anyone, but I don’t want to imitate more than a detail or two; I prefer my clothes humdrum and inconspicuous, and a cowboy hat just doesn’t work for me.

Adopting mannerisms is called mimicry. That is not a good way to do things. You don’t start to imitate somebody, the way he walks and talks, that is a very irrelevant element of acting.

Children always tend to imitate everything that we are doing in front of them.

I know I idolise someone like Billie Holiday, but I don’t look at her and think I have to imitate her lifestyle, to try and sing like she did.

It is not so much the example of others we imitate as the reflection of ourselves in their eyes and the echo of ourselves in their words.

I don’t want to imitate life in movies; I want to represent it. And in that representation, you use the colors you feel, and sometimes they are fake colors. But always it’s to show one emotion.

Occasionally, especially on video games and with a lot of the fighting stuff, to get what you feel is the proper sound, you have to imitate what you’re doing, and occasionally I’ve gotten carried away and kicked over mic stands or punched things.

There is a history of gay people pretending to be straight. I want to balance the sides. I’m a straight person pretending to be gay. I’ve had a lot of people to imitate. It’s easy when you’re British; we’re camp by nature, anyway.

One of the first comic things you do is imitate.

Washington’s entire honesty of mind and his fearless look into the face of all facts are qualities which can never go out of fashion and which we should all do well to imitate.

A good composer does not imitate; he steals.

If you are going to be a character for the long-term you can’t just imitate, you have to bring yourself to it.

English, as a subject, never really got over its upstart nature. It tries to bulk itself up with hopeless jargon and specious complexity, tries to imitate subjects it can never be.

When I sing along with Britney Spears I will sing in an American accent. But eventually I found my own voice. My songs are so brutally honest, it would be alien to sing in any accent other than my own. Don’t get me wrong – I can imitate singers. I can do bar mitzvahs and weddings.

I like that 3D is based on the fact that you look with two eyes, so two cameras imitate that.

I was pretty young when my folks were playing those kinds of records, ’70s rock and psychedelic stuff. So I just remember those songs being synonymous with my childhood, and I was always trying to imitate them on piano.

Certainly early on, I kind of modeled myself after Steve Martin and Bill Murray. I would imitate them sometimes.

I have my own thing going on; I don’t want to imitate anyone else.

Just as the slave master required the slaves to imitate the image he had of them, so women, who live in a relatively powerless position, politically and economically, feel obliged by a kind of implicit force to live up to culture’s image of what is female.

The great strength of the totalitarian state is that it forces those who fear it to imitate it.

It messed with my head a little bit when people started to imitate what I was doing.