Quotes About Originality

Maybe authors shouldn't write more than one or two books. Maybe you just keep writing the same book over and over anyway.

The Odyssey is constantly free and constantly inventive.

In the words of Dr. Seuss: Today you are you! That is truer than true! There is no one alive who is you-er than you!

The thing about you, her mother used to say, is that you never act out of character. You have no originality. But Nigora knew this was not true. Because she was going to act out of character, She was going (thought Nigora) to be herself. And yet: how could she? How could she?

It is absurd to ape our betters.

Hope not to succeed in borrowed plumes.

Everyone is interested in what's new. Few people are interested in what's better.

There's a whole category of people who miss out by not allowing themselves to be weird enough.

The architects who benefit us most maybe those generous enough to lay aside their claims to genius in order to devote themselves to assembling graceful but predominantly unoriginal boxes. Architecture should have the confidence and the kindness to be a little boring.

Just be yourself' is about the worst advice you can give some people.

The problem with cliches is not that they contain false ideas, but rather that they are superficial articulations of very good ones. The sun is often on fire at sunset and the moon discreet, but if we keep saying this every time we encounter a sun or a moon, we will end up believing that this is the last rather than the first word to be said on the subject. Cliches are detrimental insofar as they inspire us to believe that they adequately describe a situation while merely grazing its surface.

Wanting to sound like other people has its temptations. There are inherited habits of speech guaranteed to make us sound authoritative, intelligent, worldly, appropriately grateful, or deeply moved.

Original thoughts are like shy animals. We sometimes have to look the other way – towards a busy street or terminal – before they run out of their burrows.

We believe, as Nietzsche put it, that 'higher is not allowed to grow out of the lower, is not allowed to have grown at all .. everything first-rate must be causa sui [the cause of itself].

An architect intent on being different may in the end prove as troubling as an over-imaginative pilot or doctor.

The problem with clichés is not that they contain false ideas, but rather that they are superficial articulations of very good ones. The sun

You are not here to duplicate and replicate. You are here to initiate.

Labour at your work until people cannot imagine what you have designed existing any other way.

Windows are for people with no imagination.

This might be the most important question for every creator and maker in the world: how do you make something new if most people just like what they know? Is it possible to surprise with familiarity?

If you know what you are going to write when you're writing a poem, it's going to be average.

You have those people who are born old fashion and there are others who are born with the drip for life. MillYentei

I do not quote my own movies. I think I would be pretty insufferable if I did.

We must always remember that we are only midwives—if we want praise for progeny we must give birth to our own.