Quotes About Originality

Picasso has been many times quoted as saying good artists copy, great artists steal.

Steve Jobs in 1996. I like to think that we may begin with imitation, graduate to emulation, and then aspire to creation.

The New Yorker will not be edited for the old lady from Dubuque.

When Halliburton expressed curiosity about this "inconceivable power," Bob took him into his room, showed him his "immense file of pictures," and gave him a lecture on visualization. Far from being impressed, Halliburton became convinced that "Irwin had no pre-imagination, none whatsoever. That was his whole problem. He could imitate things. He couldn't create things.

Building your brand doesn't take millions. It takes imagination.

The photographs that excite me are photographs that say something in a new manner; not for the sake of being different but ones that are different because the individual is different and the individual expresses himself.

All progress occurs because people dare to be different.

No matter what they wish for, no matter how far they go, people can never be anything but themselves. That's all.

If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.

My hair looks like it had been purchased at a rummage sale after all the real hair was gone.

Creativity is the fun of putting together unexpected ideas

When you are born and put into your crib, the whole world sticks their heads over the tops of the bars. They give you a name and they have all sorts of different ideas about you. … But your task is to become something much more unique and surprising than anyone your parents could ever imagine you to be. You have to know that the life you have is completely yours.

Personality is more important than beauty, but imagination is more important than both of them.

When you are genuinely being your true self, you need no words of explanation. You just are.

But if you made yourself up, you got to be exactly who you knew yourself to be.

Just being yourself never worked, but if you made yourself up, you got to be exactly who you knew yourself to be.

It never occurred to me that others had done this before me.

Where there is much pretension, much has been borrowed: nature never pretends.

True genius repeats itself forever, and never repeats itself--one ever varied sense beams novelty and unity on all.

different. Not only the

The less attention I pay to what people want and the more attention I pay to just writing the book I want to write, the better I do.

If you can't imitate him, don't copy him.

He knew what was going on in painting in this country in the Fifties and Sixties. Abstract Expressionism, Pop-Art, Minimal, Op-Art, Less-is-More, Flat, all the avant-garde idiocies. But Maitland paid no attention to it. He went his way. Traditional. Representational. If he painted a tit, it was a tit.

Duke Ellington was famous for hs very original harmonic patterns.