Quotes About Originality

The most seductive thing about art is the personality of the artist himself.

trying to force yourself to be different never really works.

In art, all who have done something other than their predecessors have merited the epithet of revolutionary and it is they alone who are masters.

Art is either revolution or plagiarism

When I turned about 12 or 13, I realised that being funny wasn't about remembering jokes. It was about creating them.

Ah, how hard it was, even half-delirious or asleep, to conceive of something new!

Design is everything. Everything!

Simplicity is not the goal. It is the by-product of a good idea and modest expectations.

Frequently, trite ideas or unimaginative translation of those ideas is the result not of poor subject matter but of poor interpretation of a problem.

Feel the fine qualities of creativity permeating your breasts and assuming delicate configurations.

That's the secret of creativity. You have to steal around. If you keep going back to that same 7-Eleven, they're going to catch you. So you go over to the floral shop, the gas station that nobody ever goes to, and you steal all this shit, and you put it together and people say, "Wow." They think it's yours.

English people are not mass-produced. They do not come off a factory line all looking, speaking, thinking, acting the same. Neither do we.

My dad was this sort of avant-garde guy who did all kinds of weird things. He was a true original and anybody who met him never forgot him.

Be neither a conformist or a rebel, for they are really the same thing. Find your own path, and stay on it

I is what I is.

Let them be birds eggs has no soup

I think you create your own hipness.

Anything that is not autobiography is plagiarism.

Well, as I was saying, it costs a lot to be authentic, madam. And one can't be stingy with these things, because you are more authentic the more you resemble what you've dreamed you are. - Agrado from "Todo Sobre Mi Madre

Oddly enough, the more tired you get as you write and rewrite, the more likely you are to abandon any self-conscious semi-stentorian writing and write more like yourself. Fatigue lets you emerge. This is good.)

The voice of our original self is often muffled, overwhelmed, even strangled, by the voices of other people's expectations. The tongue of the original self is the language of the heart.

Hence the vanity of translation; it were as wise to cast a violet into a crucible that you might discover the formal principle of its color and odor, as seek to transfuse from one language into another the creations of a poet. The plant must spring again from its seed, or it will bear no flower—and this is the burden of the curse of Babel.

We are not here to do what has already been done.

and low-life cable network producers, who have never had a thought in their heads that did not come from something else they saw on cable television, are so unthreatened by me that they feel safe stealing my stuff and claiming to have had sudden strokes of genius.