Quotes About Originality

Nevertheless, in spite of all these professional grudges, artists are conscious of a social warmth from each other's presence and contiguity. They shiver at the remembrance of their lonely studios in the unsympathizing cities of their native land. For the sake of such brotherhood as they can find, more than for any good that they get from galleries, they linger year after year in Italy, while their originality dies out of them, or is polished away as a barbarism.

If you are creative, you must be dissident.

I must create a system or be enslaved by another man's; I will not reason and compare: my business is to create. —WILLIAM BLAKE, "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

What do you do with a textbook case when no one's written the textbook?

It's like art, you know? Picasso had to prove to the world he can paint the right way, before he goes putting both eyes on one side of a face, and noses stickin' outta kneecaps and stuff. See, if you paint wrong because that's the best you can do, you just a chump. But you do it because you want to? Then you're an artist.

The artist, the true artist, the true poet, should paint only in accordance with what he sees or feels. He must be really faithful to his own nature. He must avoid, like death itself, the temptation of borrowing the eyes or feelings of another man, however great, for in that case the production he gave us would be a pack of lies, relatively to himself, not realities.

de aquel que estudie en lo antiguo algo que no sea el arte puro, la lógica, el método general! De tanto zambullirse en ello, pierde el recuerdo del presente; abdica el valor y los privilegios que otorga la circunstancia; pues casi toda nuestra originalidad proviene del sello que imprime el tiempo en nuestras sensaciones.

Woe betide the man who goes to antiquity for the study of anything other than ideal art, logic and general method! By immersing, himself too deeply in it, he will no longer have the present in his mind's eye; he throws away the value and the privileges afforded by circumstance; for nearly all our originality comes from the stamp that it impresses upon our sensibility.

I never pump up my vulgarity. I wait for it to arrive in its own terms.

A cat is only itself.

Style means no shield at all. Style means no front at all. Style means ultimate naturalness. Style means one man alone with billions of men about.

The masses are always wrong - Wisdom is doing everything the crowd does not do. All you do is reverse the totality of their learning and you have the heaven they're looking for.

I think that people who keep notebooks and jot down their thoughts are jerk-offs. I am only doing this because somebody suggested I do it, so you see, I'm not even an original jerk-off. But this somehow makes it easier. I just let it roll. Like a hot turd down a hill.

We are hardly ever as that which we create

Shakespeare never did this.

Style is the answer to everything.

I can sit down and vomit on the keys but it's my vomit. it's better than sitting in a room with 3 or 4 people and their pianos. this is my piano and it is better than theirs.

I agree that complacency hardly engenders an immortal literature but neither does repetition.

Maybe if you could get away from the obvious often enough, you wouldn't become so obvious yourself.

Style is the difference, a way of doing, a way of being done.

Can you remember who you were before the world told you who you should be?

Van Gogh escrevendo ao irmão pedindo tintas [...] a impossibilidade de ser humano [...] Shakespeare um plagiador [...] demasiado humano [...]

It was best to stay away from other writers and just do your work…

We select and set aside as literature that which is original, the product of what we call genius.