Quotes About Originality

You can't use up creativity. The more you use, the more you have. As quoted in Conversations with Maya Angelou (1989)

Being herself was extraordinary enough

Handbags are not important anymore," Connie admonished her. "It said so in Vogue. Right now it's all about having something no one else possesses. It's about the one of a kind. The unique.

I am not a genuine woman, but I am not interested in genuineness.

The book was better than the movie. For one thing, there was a lot more in it. And some of the pictures were awfully different from the movie.

T]he creativity of the human creature is such that genuinely new realities are regularly brought into being.

The most unpresentable persons are generally the most interesting.

Nursemaid, you mean? Someone who can sing me to sleep at bedtime, spoon porridge into my mouth, and wipe my"—he hesitated just long enough to make both servants cringe with dread—"chinif I dribble?" "I haven't the voice for lullabies and I'm sure you're perfectly capable of wiping your own…chin,

the artist can never quite get on terms with God, who as far as creation goes has got there first and pulled off a product hard to beat.

At its finest, it has produced work of rare insight and originality. At its least creditable, it represents little more than the foreign affairs department of postmodernism.

The most uninspired form of criticism simply tells the story of a work in different words. Some students imagine they are writing criticism when for the most part they are simply paraphrasing a text, occasionally throwing in the odd comment of their own.

The only thing you can be is yourself nothing more nothing less

Dalton had expected it, he never failed to find it remarkable the way he had but to say a thing enough times, through enough people, and it became the popular truth, its provenance lost as it was mimicked by ordinary people who came to believe that it was their own idea—as if original thought routinely came forth from their witless minds of clay.

Then you understand the wide range of the totally new and unexpected creations they can sometimes come up with. Most people's minds travel along the same road traveled by everyone else, never straying off the route of conventional wisdom. Makers know no such boundaries. They have a rare ability to make their own roads of thought. Their minds venture through the wilderness of all that exists, combining random bits of knowledge in ways that have never been imagined before.

he had created a solution where it had never before existed, or even been imagined.

That's a maker," Isidore said. "That's the way they are. Creativity in large and small ways defines their nature in everything they do.

The reason that clichés become clichés is that they are the hammers and screwdrivers in the toolbox of communication.

Down there - he said - are people who will follow any dragon, worship any god, ignore any inequity. All out of a kind of humdrum, everyday badness. Not the really high, creative loathsomeness of the great sinners, but a sort of mass-produced darkness of the soul. Sin, you might say, without a trace of originality. They accept evil not because they say yes, but because they don't say no.

Good or bad, do it as you. Too many lies and there's no truth to go back to.

Now he knew: They were real. Who'd make up a thing like this? Okay, one of them was a cheese that rolled around of its own accord, but nobody was perfect.

You're not going to tell me they built fifty-foot-high killer golems, are you? Only a man would think of that. It's our job, said Moist. If you don't think of fifty-foot-high killer golems first, someone else will.

The only hat worth wearing was the one you made for yourself, not one you bought, not one you were given. Your own hat, for your own head. Your own future, not someone else's.

This man was so absent-mindedly clever that he could paint pictures that didn't just follow you around the room but went home with you and did the washing-up.

There are no maps. You can't map a sense of humor.