Quotes About Originality

Why waste precious time and energy trying to be someone you're not when you can put it to much better use simply being yourself?

I'm never trying to be commercial or accessible, or saying "let's do this weird stuff, but at the same time we gotta do this safe stuff".

We never write anything with themes. We just write the same rubbish all the time.

I love pop music. It's not easy to write a good pop song. It may be easier to put out a fake jazz album, as Sting does from time to time.

I get bored with the same old film coming out every weekend. It feels like it's the same story all the time, and the same visuals, and the characters' dilemmas are remarkably similar.

There is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and it will be lost.

People have done this before, but not us.

Trying to be like me as a person is not a good idea. To have the same interest, to talk about the same and so on and so on... it's kind time waste!

A patent, or invention, is any assemblage of technologies or ideas that you can put together that nobody put together that way before. That's how the patent office defines it. That's an invention

My name is Kurt Schwitters... I am an artist and I nail my pictures together.

Fashion has always been a repetition of ideas, but what makes it new is the way you put it together.

Bring together things that have as yet never been brought together and did not seem predisposed to be so.

Genius and taste don't go together.

My own thing is in my head. I hear sounds and if I don't get them together nobody else will.

I think that the music we create together is one of a kind.

Innovation is taking two things that already exist and putting them together in a new way.

The most uninteresting thing for me is when somebody thinks too much about how they put themselves together.

I'm kind of a quirky dresser usually. Like today, I'm actually pretty put together, but I dress kind of off sometimes, but that's just part of my personality.

I don't think there are any footsteps to be walked in. No one else has taken things that you can buy at the grocery store and put them together. I hope that I have a career as long as Julia Child.

Is it not dangerous to have students study together for years, copying the same models and approximately the same path?

Real You is all you have, and all other paths are false. And in the best case, Real You is so happy to finally be recognized, it rewards you with Originality.

Writing the real self seldom seems original enough when you first happen on it.

Students love trying to imitate Nabokov, which teaches them a lot—mostly about why not to imitate somebody wired so differently from yourself. Nabokov wannabes don't sound just like turds, but like pretentious turds. The writer's best voice will grow from embracing her own "you-ness"—which I call talent, and which is best expressed in voice. Which

Others can't stand to revise; instead they decide they're avant-garde, so everybody who doesn't like their work is unenlightened. (Note: being avant-garde is now... well, garde.)