Quotes About Originality

We were into Hendrix and Cream, who were like the heaviest bands around at that time. We just wanted to be heavier than everybody else!

O imitators, you slavish herd!

I don't want to follow the herd.

There's a heresy which is perpetuated by film school that to be a great director you have to write your own stuff.

When someone comes along and expresses him or herself as freely as they think, people flock to it. They enjoy it.

Hey, Christian rock, if you want to be good, stop copying U2. U2 already did it. You know what I mean? There's a lot of U2-esque Christian rock.

You don't want to be a gimmick. You don't want to be a set piece, where people go, 'Hey, that's weird.'

People always ask us, 'Hey, is there going to be a 'Beerfest 2'?' I don't know if I have another beer joke in me.

I have my own language and it's high time I put a little of it out there.

You have to think outside the box! Can you imagine One Direction and Eminem?! That would be hilarious.

He who goes against the fashion is himself its slave.

It's very original, no doubt, but not for a hot evening. What I need is some trollop.

I wish I had [made that song]. No, I don't That would be to take it from somebody else. But it's mine for all that.' 'What makes it yours?' 'I love it so.' 'Does loving a thing make it yours?' 'I think so, Mother -- at least more than anything else can. . . . Love makes the only myness,' said Diamond.

he was always too much of a man to want to look like a man by imitating men. That is unmanly. A boy who wants to look like a man is not a manly boy, and men do not care for his company. A true boy is always welcome to a true man, but a would-be man is better on the other side of the wall.

the writer knows more or less what he wants to say, but an accumulation of stale phrases chokes him like tea-leaves blocking a sink.

There exists a huge dump of worn-out metaphors which have lost all evocative power and are merely used because they save people the trouble of inventing phrases for themselves.

Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.

A man who would write the same book twice could not even write it once.

Good novels are written by people who are not frightened.

A story is a really weird art object that should contain life but not be enslaved by the banality.

Randall Jarrell said about stories holds true for the writers of stories: they "don't want to know, don't want to care, they just want to do as they please.

I'd say there's a general thesis in here somewhere: any story that suffers from what seems like a moral failing (that seems sexist, racist, homophobic, transphobic, pedantic, appropriative, derivative of another writer's work, and so on) will be seen, with sufficient analytical snooping, to be suffering from a technical failing, and if that failing is addressed, it will (always) become a better story.

You don't understand!" she exclaimed bitterly. "That," said his lordship, with a touch of acidity, "is a foolish accusation which lacks even the saving grace of originality! Every generation, my child, has said, or thought, that the preceding one was devoid of understanding or experience.

You see, I am not pretty, not in the least, never was, and so I have to be odd. Nothing for it! It answers delightfully.