Quotes About Originality

I think of myself as a jungle musician because of my lack of formal training.

I am among the few who continue to draw after childhood is ended, continuing and perfecting childhood drawing - without the traditional interruption of academic training.

My training and my inclination is to invent.

I think successful movies that are based on books are their own thing. I think if you're too faithful, word by word, character trait to character trait, it can hurt the movie.

I have a suspicion of lockstep and everyone looking in the same direction: that's a key character trait in me.

You always try to do your own thing. One of the things I wanted to do was to write a book that combines some of the best traits of contemporary fantasy with some of the traits of the historical novel.

In the art world, originality is seen as a precious commodity and its increasingly difficult to get because the territory of art is so trampled.

I encourage the translators of my books to take as much license as they feel that they need. This is not quite the heroic gesture it might seem, because I've learned, from working with translators over the years, that the original novel is, in a way, a translation itself.

You have to transmit to them what it's like being in the theater. And it has to come from somewhere inside you and not by being like what somebody did last year.

I want to be as creatively disruptive as possible. I want to be radically transparent in a way that isn't showboating.

There's gonna be a lot of great songs, but there ain't going to be another 'Trap Queen.'

If you want to be wrong, then follow the masses.

People who are exactly like other people probably don't exist. But people who seem like most other people litter our lives, and we don't usually seek their company because they are boring. Readers don't read novels in order to experience the boredom they often experience in life. They want to meet interesting people, extraordinary people, preferably people different from anyone they've met before in or out of fiction.

I thought I'd begin by reading a poem by Shakespeare, but then I thought, why should I? He never reads any of mine.

Rather hang thyself than belong to the horde of successful imitators.

Genius discovers a system; average talent stereotypes it till it is shattered by fresh genius.

A writer should not run around with a mirror for his countrymen; he should tell his society and his times things no one ever thought before.

I don't believe in fashion. I believe in costume. Life is too short to be same person every day.

Sometimes thinking outside of the box can be the difference between life and death.

Sometimes an artist's first invention is herself.

All fixed set patterns are incapable of adaptability or pliability. The truth is outside of all fixed patterns.

Truth is that the best ideas are often psychotic, obscene and unoriginal.

A consistent thinker is a thoughtless person, because he conforms to a pattern; he repeats phrases and thinks in a groove.

It wasn't until I was 37 that I grasped the great truth that you've got to write your own books and nobody else's, and then everything followed from there.