Quotes About Originality

One day he decided that his liking for poetry could not be fully expressed in just reading poetry or listening to poets reading on phonograph records. He decided to take the plumbing out of his house and completely replace it with poetry, and so he did.

You can't write ... on the strength of influence. You can only write a good story or a good novel by yourself.

When something is claimed to be new, do not be too hasty to think it is just the past slightly improved - it might be a great opportunity for you to do significant things. But again it may be nothing new.

Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up. PABLO PICASSO

Younger artists are seedlings. Their early work resembles thicket and underbrush, even weeds. The halls of academia, with their preference for lofty intellectual theorems, do little to support the life of the forest floor.

Art lies in the moment of encounter: we meet ourselves and we meet our self-expression. We become original because we become something specific, an origin from which work flows.

Every child is born an artist. The trick is remaining one as an adult.

each of us is our own country, an interesting place to visit. It is the accurate mapping out of our own creative interests that invites the term original. We are the origin of our art, its homeland. Viewed this way, originality is the process of remaining true to ourselves.

What moves men of genius, or rather what inspires their work, is not new ideas, but their obsession with the idea that what has already been said is still not enough.

We will discover the nature of our particular genius when we stop trying to conform to our own or to other peoples' models, learn to be ourselves, and allow our natural channel to open. SHAKTI GAWAIN

We don't always want to read about everyday things – and that silly stuff is so much fun to parody.

Most people, in my opinion, steal much of what they are. If they didn't what poor items they would be.

Our lack of originality is something we usefully forget as we hunch over our—to us—ever-fascinating lives. My friend M., leaving his wife for a younger woman, used to complain, "People tell me it's a cliché. But it doesn't feel like a cliché to me." Yet it was, and is. As all our lives would prove, if we could see them from a greater distance—from the viewpoint, say, of that higher creature imagined by Einstein.

They didn't want you to fake adherence to their banal taste and meaningless critical slogans – they wanted you actually to believe in them.

I think a great book—leaving aside other qualities such as narrative power, characterization, style, and so on—is a book that describes the world in a way that has not been done before; and that is recognized by those who read it as telling new truths—about society or the way in which emotional lives are led, or both—such truths having not been previously available, certainly not from official records or government documents, or from journalism or television.

The parrot/writer feebly accepts language as something received, imitative and inert

the imagination's first duty was to be transgressive

Do not go where the path may lead. Go instead where there is no path and leave a trail. —RALPH WALDO EMERSON

In the name of motherhood and fatherhood and education and good manners, we threaten and suffocate and bind and ensnare and bribe and trick children into wholesale emulation of our ways. Indeed, originality is recognized as disobedience, pathology, incorrigible character and/or unlawful conduct to be prosecuted by the state.

No matter how many faces I have, there is no changing the fact that I am me. I was just attempting to fill in a too-long intermission in my life with a trivial "masked play.

it takes someone brave to do what everyone else is afraid to do first.

Sweet? Submissive? May as well be a housewife Ã¢â'¬Â¦ it dims my luster, makes me resemble others—that's the worst thing that could happen.

You are magnificent because you are so uniquely you

Reinvent new combinations of what you already own. Improvise. Become more creative. Not because you have to, but because you want to. Evolution is the secret for the next step.