Quotes About Originality

It is time of individualities now. Good performing skills are not enough now, you may sing better or worse - tons of good singers are waiting outside - it doesn't matter. You have to be different!

Surely it was time someone invented a new plot, or that the author came out from the bushes.

Genius is talent provided with ideals. Genius starves while talent wears purple and fine linen. The man of genius of today will infifty years' time be in most cases no more than a man of talent.

People compared Garden State to the Graduate, but when was the last time you saw Dustin Hoffman doing what I do?

I never had the influence of any other singer in my music, so I sounded like myself all the time.

Talent may be in time forgiven, but genius never

And then, also, when you're doing something that doesn't sound like anything else on the radio at the time, you almost need to, like, ironclad it to make sure it gets through, you know?

Perhaps no poet is a conscious plagiarist, but there seems to be warrant for suspecting that there is no poet who is not at one time or another an unconscious one.

There is no such thing as a new idea. It is impossible. We simply take a lot of old ideas and put them into a sort of mental kaleidoscope. We give them a turn and they make new and curious combinations. We keep on turning and making new combinations indefinitely; but they are the same old pieces of colored glass that have been in use through all the ages.

Well, everybody does it that way, Huck. Tom, I am not everybody.

A person with a new idea is a crank until the idea succeeds.

All ideas are second-hand, consciously and unconsciously drawn from a million outside sources, and daily used by the gardener with a pride and satisfaction born of the superstition that he originated them; whereas there is not a rag of originality about them anywhere except the little discoloration they get from his mental and moral calibre and his temperament, and which is revealed in characteristics of phrasing.

My works are like water. The works of the great masters are like wine. But everyone drinks water. - From Mark Twain's Notebook, 1885

Nature has no originality--I mean, no large ability in the matter of inventing new things, new ideas, new stage effects. She has a superb and amazing and infinitely varied equipment of old ones, but she never adds to them. She repeats--repeats--repeats--repeats. Examine your memory and your experience; you will find it is true.

God made the Sea of Galilee and its surroundings as they are. Is it the province of Mr. Grimes to improve upon the work?

The man with a new idea is a Crank until the idea succeeds.

it began with a prayer built from the ground up of solid courses of Scriptural quotations, welded together with a thin mortar of originality; and from the summit of this she delivered a grim chapter of the Mosaic Law, as from Sinai.

At meetings I've heard people say proudly that they have no original thoughts, that everything they say they learned in meetings or from reading the Big Book. Wouldn't that be nice? I have so many original thoughts I have to take medication for it.

Keep true to the rare music in your heart, to the marvelous and unique form that is and shall always be nothing else but you. Keep to that and you can do no wrong, which I realize is easier said than done.

Not a beauty queen. Not one of those. You know the ones. She was real.

Nice has nothing to do with me.

He never signed anything ever again, because he didn't need to. From this point onwards, it was always obvious whose work this was. It was installed by July 1500 – if not before. The Pietà made his name: he was twenty-five years old.

This ground itself needs to be properly accounted for by that for which it accounts, that is, by the causation through the supremely original matter – and that is the cause as causa sui. This is the right name for the god of philosophy. Man can neither pray nor sacrifice to this god. Before the causa sui, man can neither fall to his knees in awe nor can he play music and dance before this god.

People say you should only write what you know. But you only write what you know because you are too fucking stupid to make anything up.