Quotes About Originality

You can write books, but there's only ever one book that's really you.

Chances are everything's already been said, but since no one is paying attention you have to start all over again.

Explicar las cosas tal y como han sucedido es lo más aburrido del mundo. Debería de estar prohibido. Yo invento las historias por pura cortesía.

I'd rather be a freak than a clone.

I think that everyone should have at least a part of them that's self-invented; in fact, the world would be much more interesting if we all created our own identities afresh whenever we felt like it. Otherwise you're just walking around regurgitating what's expected, which is like, why bother?

Even her romances, forming a class apart from all, which had gone before, and unapproached by imitators, wore a certain air of antiquity, and seemed scarcely to belong to the present age.

I made a real specific decision when I came out of school and most artists were writing about home - if you were a woman, you were writing about being a woman - and I decided not to do that, write about what you know. That's not what I do. I went as far away from home as possible in terms of the development of my imagination.

After all, nobody else ever made a sketch of the dishes in your sink. That you probably can't think of a similar image is also helpful.

In addition, you can be sure your drawing of your surroundings will have a modest degree of originality. After all, nobody else ever made a sketch of the dishes in your sink. That you probably can't think of a similar image is also helpful.

Every story has already been told. Once you've read Anna Karenina, Bleak House, The Sound and the Fury, To Kill a Mockingbird and A Wrinkle in Time, you understand that there is really no reason to ever write another novel. Except that each writer brings to the table, if she will let herself, something that no one else in the history of time has ever had." [ Commencement Speech ; Mount Holyoke College, May 23, 1999]

A finished person is a boring person.

Nothing important, or meaningful, or beautiful, or interesting, or great ever came out of imitations. The thing that is really hard and really amazing is to give up on being perfect and beginning the work of becoming yourself.

Create your own style… let it be unique for yourself and yet identifiable for others.

Just be true to yourself, and listen as much as one is able to to other people whose opinions you respect and look up to but in the end it has to come from you. You can't really worry too much by looking to the left and the right about what the competition is doing or what other people in your field are doing. It has to be a true vision.

I am obnoxious to each carping tongueWho says my hand a needle better fits,A poet's pen all scorn I should thus wrong,For such despite they cast on female wits:If what I do prove well, it won't advance,They'll say it's stol'n, or else it was by chance.

All lovers believe they are inventing love.

be you and not someone else

The most exhausting thing you can do is to be inauthentic.

One of my rules is never to look sideways at what other people are doing but instead, do what I feel is right.

Is it live, or is it Memorex?

The informing idea of what you want to say and do, that's what will take you from film school to professional - the idea. That's what is original to you.

I hope to make movies that are so small they don't need to make anything to be profitable.

Not to invent yourself is to be false. To follow preordained rules is a profound betrayal of what it means to be human.

To be able to take music and do something as profoundly original as what we did with the Allman Brothers, you've got to put some time into it.