Quotes About Originality

Unable to explore setting, conflict, characters or themes in their fiction, the mainstreamers wrote more and more eloquently about nothing at all.

Why should a book tell a tale in a dull straight line?

Why should I write what they told me to write just because they told me to write it?

Sheep follow blindly. We're not supposed to be sheep.

what we have to do with regard to the great wisdom from the whole of the past, both in the East and in the West, is to assimilate it and go on to new and original perception relevant to our present condition of life.

The only art I'll ever study is stuff that I can steal from.

Sometimes I don't feel as if I'm a person at all. I'm just a collection of other people's ideas.

I find only freedom in the realms of eccentricity.

I needed to sing because nobody else was singing my songs.

out a calculation or apply an algorithm. Next

The Tandu were daring, but they did not add to their crimes the gaucherie of originality.

He can come up with the most exotic things I've ever seen or heard of every time he blinks his eyes.

won't be them; it will be me.

Readers crave something different, but not completely different.

Your personal tastes are going to be influenced by the stories that you've loved the most. So don't ever try to be "completely" original. It's a good way to go mad.

Like so many other nerdy, disaffected young people of that time, I dreamed of becoming an 'artist', i.e., somebody whose adult job was original and creative instead of tedious and dronelike.

What the really great artists do is they're entirely themselves. They're entirely themselves. They've got their own vision, their own way of fracturing reality, and that if it's authentic and true, you will feel it in your nerve endings.

What's interesting to Hal Incandenza about his take on Struck, sometimes Pemulis, Evan Ingersoll, et al. is that congenital plagiarists put so much more work into camouflaging their plagiarism than it would take just to write up an assignment from conceptual scratch. It usually seems like plagiarists aren't lazy so much as kind of navigationally insecure. They have trouble navigating without a detailed map's assurance that somebody has been this way before them.

Si scopre che tanto più è insipida la frase fatta ...., tanto più affilati sono i canini della verità vera che nasconde

Novelty has charms that our mind can hardly withstand.

And now we turn to another blank page. A future standing before us like freshly fallen snow. Awaiting that first mark, that first step forward. A new journey to be started. A new promise to be fulfilled. A new page to be written. Go forth unto this waiting world with pen in hand, all you young scribes, the open book awaits. Be creative. Be adventurous. Be original. And above all else, be young. For youth is your greatest weapon, your greatest tool. Use it wisely.

En todo lo que hace el hombre hay una imitación, y en el hecho de escapar a la soledad, la imitación resulta estridente.

God made him, and therefore let him pass for a man. In truth, I know it is a sin to be a mocker, but he! why, he hath a horse better than the Neapolitan's, a better bad habit of frowning than the Count Palentine; he is every man in no man. If a throstle sing, he falls straight a-cap'ring. He will fence with his own shadow. If I should marry him, I should marry twenty husbands.

You are what you are, I am what I am. It's just as simple as that.