Quotes About Originality

Everything that is really great and inspiring is created by the individual who can labor in freedom.

Improvement makes strait roads: but the crooked roads without Improvement are roads of Genius.

A good scientist is a person with original ideas. A good engineer is a person who makes a design that works with as few original ideas as possible

Imperfection is beauty, madness is genius

Being normal is boring!

I believe that love--not imitation--is the sincerest form of flattery. Your imitator thinks that you can be duplicated; your lover knows you can't.

I always question artists who are successful in whatever they do—I think what that means is that they're repeating themselves and not taking enough risks.

Creativity Loves Constraints.

Madness is only a variety of mental nonconformity and we are all individualists here.

Don't just go out and do what Dick Eastman or your spiritual hero did. That's a spiritual cop-out. Copycat spirituality is short lived.

Different is liberating. Who the hell would want to be the same as everyone else?

Copying lies at the heart of creativity.

Many articles and books on creativity encourage us to 'think out of the box' and get rid of all the restrictions on our thinking. The trouble with this advice is that it is almost entirely wrong. It is very difficult to be creative when 'anything goes' and you have no limitations, because it is the limitations that actually encourage creativity.

To develope [sic] the powers of the Creator is our proper employment—and to imitate Creativeness by combination our most exalted and self-satisfying Delight.

I did not realize at the time, as I have discovered since, that anyone who attempts any thing original in this world must expect a bit of ridicule." Clarence Birdseye

I always wondered why nobody did it before me. I mean, all those comic book movies and television shows, you'd think at least one eccentric loner would have stitched himself a costume.

Don't write for the market or for others. Write what you know, love and above all, write what you would love to read.

A writer's downfall is chasing the marketplace. Doing that, you only see it's rear end. Write from the heart, not for the market.

What makes a person's words and actions worth remembering are how they are different from everyone else's.

The world does not need a 'gay Elvis', for the original, with his black leather suit, pomaded pompadour, come-fuck-me eyes and radiant narcissism, was quite queer enough

To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment

What a good thing Adam had. When he said a good thing he knew nobody had said it before.

A man with a new idea is a crank -- until the idea succeeds.

An Englishman is a person who does things because they have been done before. An American is a person who does things because they haven't been done before.