Quotes About Originality

Artist?' Thomas suggested. 'That's a word. I've never heard anyone say it, but I've read it in some of the books. It means, well, someone who makes something beautiful. Would that be a word?

he was getting mortally tired of having to reinvent the wheel every fifteen minutes.

You either have to be first, best, or different.

To vault from the trenches of habitual thinking -- that is the birth of genius. Traussbery

no person, no matter how vivid an imagination he may have, can invent anything half so droll as the freaks and fancies that originate in the lively brains of little people.

I want to be great, or nothing. I won't be a commonplace dauber, so I don't intend to try any more.

Use your imagination, I tell my students these days, or someone else is going to use it for you.

But then, no artist is normal; if he were, he wouldn't be an artist.

you can't be anybody but yourself. At the end of the day, you're stuck with that

You can work it out by Fractions or by simple Rule of Three, But the way of Tweedle-dum is not the way of Tweedle-dee. You can twist it, you can turn it, you can plait it till you drop, But the way of Pilly Winky's not the way of Winkie Pop!

You need to be a little bit crazy. Crazy is the price you pay for having an imagination. It's your superpower. Tapping into the dream. It's a good thing, not a bad thing.

And with an inventiveness no one would have suspected from the standard of Stanley's school work:

We are original in our happy moments. Sorrow has only one voice, one cry.

Children interested Miss Peters, especially when she found one that had not been run into a mold or cut out of a given piece of cloth and made up like a flannel rabbit.

About as genuine as tea made from a bit of paper which once lay in a drawer beside another piece of paper which had been used to wrap up a few tea leaves from which tea had already been made three times.

Be that self that one is

Every individual, however original he may be, is still a child of God, of his age, of his nation, of his family and friends. Only thus is he truly himself. If in all this relativity he tries to be the absolute, then he becomes ridiculous.

If the sphere of paradox-religion is abolished, or explained away in aesthetics, an Apostle becomes neither more nor less than a genius, and then--good night, Christianity! Esprit and the Spirit, revelation and originality, a call from God and genius, all end by meaning more or less the same thing.

The enemy is stupid, he replied. That is ground for hope. There is no originality in tyrants, and they learn nothing from the demise of their precursors. They will be brutal and stifling and engender hatred and destroy what men love and that will defeat them. All important battles are, in the end, conflicts between hatred and love, and we must hold to the idea that love is stronger than hate.

Instead of making myself write the book I ought to write, the novel that was expected of me, I conjured up the book I myself would have liked to read, the sort by an unknown writer, from another age and another country, discovered in an attic. ITALO CALVINO

The question of essences remains at the heart of the adaptive act; how to make a second version of a first thing, of a book or film or poem or vegetable, or of yourself, that is successfully its own new thing and yet carries with it the essence, the spirit, the soul of the first thing, the thing that you yourself, or your book or poem or film or your mango or lime, originally were.

We're not really free unless we can put matters in our own words. And if we can't put them in our own words, we can't talk to other people, because if we speak the words of the internet or the TV news, other people will recognize that, and they are not really in our company, but somewhere else.

To be a genuine individualist requires a great deal of strength and courage. It is never easy to chart new territory, to cross new frontiers, or to introduce subtle shadings to an established color.

I get curious about new things. My real strength is going into a field that has not been investigated before, and finding new approaches to it.