Quotes About Individuality

Contra mundum? Contra mundum.

I had felt the brush take life in my hand that afternoon; I was a man of Renaissance that evening- of Browning's renaissance. I, who had walked the streets of Rome in Genoa velvet and had seen the stars through Galileo's tube, spurned the friars, with their dusty tomes and their sunken, jealous eyes and their crabbed hair-splitting speech.

I do not seek to scrape acquaintance with Lady Celia; I do not want my photograph in the Tatler, I have not come to exhibit myself.

Nobody ever became a writer just by wanting to be one. If you have anything to say, anything you feel nobody has ever said before, you have got to feel it so desperately that you will find some way to say it that nobody has ever found before, so that the thing you have to say and the way of saying it blend as one matter - as indissolubly as if they were conceived together…. - The Crack-Up

This selfishness is not only part of me. It is the most living part.

People like us can't adopt whole theories, as you did. If we can do the next thing, and have an hour a day to think in, we can accomplish marvels, but as far as any high-handed scheme of blind dominance is concerned—we'd just make asses of ourselves.

I know I'm not a regular fellow, yet I loathe anybody else that isn't.

Their point of resemblance to each other & their difference from so many American women, lay in the fact that they were all happy to exist in a man's world- they preserved their individuality through men & not by opposition to them.

I did not faintly resemble a rose.

Say stupid shit. Barf out the fucking-around-o-maniacal schizo flow. Barter whatever for whoever wants to read it.

Writers aren't people exactly. Or, if they're any good, they're a whole lot of people trying so hard to be one person.

You're not sorry to go, of course. With people like us our home is where we are not... No one person in the world is necessary to you or to me.

she knew that for her the greatest sin now and in the future was to delude herself. It had been a long lesson but she had learned it. Either you think--or else others have to think for you and take power from you, pervert and discipline your natural tastes, civilize and sterilize you.

If you have anything to say, anything you feel nobody has ever said before, you have got to feel it so desperately that you will find some way to say it that nobody has ever found before, so that the thing you have to say and the way of saying it blend as one matter--as indissolubly as if they were conceived together.

I've got an adjective that just fits you.

No one person in the world is necessary to you or to me.

The world only exists in your eyes-- your conception of it. You can make it as big or as small as you want to. And you're trying to be a little puny individual. By God, if I ever cracked, I'd try to make the world crack with me.

and will I like being called a jazz baby? --You will love it.

People invariably chose inimitable people to imitate.

He thinks himself rather an exceptional young man, thoroughly sophisticated, well adjusted to his environment, and somewhat more significant than any one else he knows.

Writers aren't exactly people.... They're a whole bunch of people trying to be one person.

You're worth the whole damn bunch put together.

God, am I like the rest after all?—So he used to think starting awake at night—Am I like the rest?

We are all queer fish, queerer behind our faces and voices than we want any one to know or than we know ourselves.