Top 95 Imitation Quotes

There’s this Bruno Mars guy. I met him in Hawaii when was doing Elvis imitations at the age of about five or six years old. There’s a lot of old school in him. He’s got a depth that I just love.

Comedians are not usually actors, but imitations of actors.

Imitation is the sincerest form of show business.

Oftentimes in films, the female character, if she’s not the protagonist – and often, even if she is – feels like an imitation of what a woman is.

Listening, not imitation, may be the sincerest form of flattery.

Anyone who draws attention to himself as an individual, is viewed with suspicion. We acquired this tendency, of course, from America, and we must resist it: levelling, and imitation of what others are already doing.

Generally speaking, when Australian winemakers try to make delicate, European-styled wines of finesse and lightness, the wines often come across as pale imitations of the originals. One exception is Australian Riesling, delicious, dry wines meant to be consumed in their first two years of life.

What goes on in abstract art is the proclaiming of aesthetic principles… It is in our own time that we have become aware of pure aesthetic considerations. Art never can be imitation.

I’m into emulation, not imitation.

The worst acting is about imitation.

There is only one kind of love, but there are a thousand imitations.

Cartoons ran into trouble when they became too much like real life images. Cartoons had become poor imitations of the real thing.

I did an imitation of him to make the crew laugh. To my shock, there was Cary Grant behind me. He got very angry. I was sent all the way from RKO to David Selznick’s office and was told not to do it anymore. I thought to myself, ‘I must have been pretty good to make him that angry.’

Fashion is something barbarous, for it produces innovation without reason and imitation without benefit.

I did imitations of anyone who came to my parents’ house, and that was my identity at school – if there were ten minutes to lunch, and the teacher was done with the lesson, he’d say, ‘Okay, Leo, get up there and do something.’

Unlike any other visual image, a photograph is not a rendering, an imitation or an interpretation of its subject, but actually a trace of it. No painting or drawing, however naturalist, belongs to its subject in the way that a photograph does.

The Negroes have little invention, but strong powers of imitation, so that they readily acquire mechanic arts. They have a great talent for music, and all their external senses are remarkably acute.

When I was 13, listening to Choice FM, I would listen to a lot of R&B from America, and whenever a British person tried to do it, it didn’t really work, they just sounded like they were trying to copy that whole style. Now the music sounds British, something real rather than an imitation.

‘The Imitation Game’ is a very British film.

Mary’s life was a perfect imitation of Jesus. She was humble, hidden, sorrowful and afflicted, but she also knew joys that never entered the heart of man. She is all things to all men that she might understand their failings, though she failed not.

Obviously I don’t play the same way as Peter, but I could do a passable imitation of Peter Green; if you gave me a guitar I could sit here and probably get closer than anybody else.

I propose not our enemies as an example for our general imitation, yet, as their navy is the best regulated of any in the world, we must, in some degree, imitate them and aim at such farther improvement as may one day make ours vie with – and exceed – theirs.

Probably I, like a lot of people, became a writer in imitation of or in homage to the books I enjoyed. When you’re so captivated by something, you think, could I do that? Hmm, let me try.

The closer a part is to you, the harder it is to play. Anything else is just imitation. If I’m playing a Russian countess, I get the hat, the accent, the outrageousness. Easy. Playing a murderess? Perfect.

The Past: Our cradle, not our prison; there is danger as well as appeal in its glamour. The past is for inspiration, not imitation, for continuation, not repetition.

It has always seemed a cruel joke to me that the very word ‘stutter’ is difficult for many stutterers to pronounce. It is onomatopoeic, an imitation of the halting, repetitive sound made by people with this speech dysfunction.

The Cube is an imitation of life itself – or even an improvement on life.

Meditation is not following any system; it is not constant repetition and imitation. Meditation is not concentration.

I don’t know if I change my act from century to century. Sometimes I’m onstage doing imitations and references to people who have been dead for 50 years.

Long ago, when I was in higher secondary school in Delhi, I read an essay by George Orwell in which he said there was a voice in his head that put into words everything he was seeing. I realised I did that, too, or maybe I started doing it in imitation.

The properties which differentiate living matter from any kind of inorganic imitation may be instinctively felt, but can hardly be formulated without expert knowledge.

It might be hard to remember this far back, but once upon a time, some of us hoped that public TV would develop into a smart, sophisticated, civilized alternative to commercial TV – not a cheap imitation of it.

I believe that a large part of the training in the regional theaters is in imitation of the British style of acting. The British orientation is textual; they start from the language and work toward the character.

How does a poet teach himself or herself? I think chiefly by imitation, chiefly by practising it as a deliberate technical exercise often. Translation, imitation, those were my methods anyway.

I’m a fly fisherman. I make flies. They’re imitations of insects at different stages in their development.

All art is but imitation of nature.

The point of painting is not really deception or imitation.

‘The Imitation Game’ is a celebration of Alan Turing’s life and legacy, and Joan’s final monologue is our eulogy. It’s the thing we all wished we could have said to him.

I don’t have to be an imitation of a white woman that Hollywood sort of hoped I’d become. I’m me, and I’m like nobody else.

I know imitation is the highest form of flattery, but stealing one’s identity is totally different.

As I’ve gotten less righteous, less pedagogic, I have become more loving of the artificiality, the art form, the imitation of life in film.

Imitation is being rewarded. They’re learning that if you fit right in the mold, you get rewarded. Music is no longer a form of expression – it’s a means to a lifestyle.

I think we always move from imitation to assimilation to innovation, but I can’t name you 20 people outside those we’ve already recognized who ever got to point three: innovation.

Unfortunately what came out of it was also kind of an imitation community with a lot of mindless conformity.

I think celebrity has become almost normalized. I feel like we all live our lives in a pale imitation of celebrity. With Facebook, we choose a photo that is not too good a photo – we’re more arch than that. We’re our own celebrity publicists. We understand it so innately.

When I got out of the Army, I started writing the usual ‘Catcher in the Rye’ imitations, and then I wrote something that was done Off-Off Broadway in a theater. It was called ‘What Else Is There?’ and it was four or five people playing missiles in a silo waiting to take off.

Men often applaud an imitation and hiss the real thing.

Art is not merely an imitation of the reality of nature, but in truth a metaphysical supplement to the reality of nature, placed alongside thereof for its conquest.

When you do an interview with me, you’re talking to a cheap imitation of the person that I really am. There’s no magic in my words, it’s just me talking.

In raising children, we need to continuously keep in mind how we can best create the most favorable environment for their imitative behavior. Everything done in the past regarding imitation must become more and more conscious and more and more consciously connected with the future.

Narrative cinema is just an imitation of life. Why would you prevent yourself and the audience of the same images, of the same that happened in real life?

Going to a grammar school, you mixed with all sorts of different types and I used to listen to how they talked. When I did my imitations, I could sound like someone really rough, or I could sound like a cabinet minister.

For film fans to support ‘The Imitation Game’ means so much to me, the entire cast and film-making team.

Godzilla’ took two months because it required a two-hour-plus score. ‘Imitation Game’ was three weeks.

Imitation is obviously a great form of flattery.

My sister and I were not allowed expensive clothes. We so badly wanted these Fila sneakers as kids, but my mother took us down to the flea market and got imitation ones. Look at the early Destiny’s Child videos. You’ll see.