Inspiration and ideas come from what you hear and what you are brought up with. That's how chinese music sounds like chinese music, african music sounds like african music and indian music sounds like indian music.

If you write a song with lines, rhymes, a chorus and verses you are using someone else's format.

Everybody takes something they have heard and develops it for their own purpose. When did you last hear music that owed nothing to anything done before?

Bob Dylan has put an enormous amount of material into the public arena and because Dylan's music sounds most of all like Dylan's music I reckon he is influenced less by outsiders than most.