Quotes About Originality

The meaning of life is creative love. Not love as an inner feeling, as a private sentimental emotion, but love as a dynamic power moving out in the world and doing something original.

Always drink upstream from the herd.

We've been watching your kind, noting it all down, putting it in our order pads while you snort in your trough. It may be fragmented, it may not be prettified, it may not be in the Grand Tradition, but let me tell you--it's ours and we're ready to publish!

Literatuur is de neerslag of het verslag van een geestelijk avontuur in een taal die eigen, levend en origineel is.

In advertising, not to be different is virtual suicide.

Improvement makes straight roads; but the crooked roads without improvement are roads of genius.

The difference between a bad artist and a good one is: the bad artist seems to copy a great deal the good one really does.

I must create a system, or be enslaved by another man's. I will not reason and compare: my business is to create.

I made my song a coat Covered with embroideries Out of old mythologies From heel to throat; But the fools caught it, Wore it in the world's eyes As though they'd wrought it. Song, let them take it For there's more enterprise In walking naked.

Sit down to write what you have thought, and not to think what you shall write.

No one should part with their individuality and become that of another.

The artist is of no importance. Only what he creates is important, since there is nothing new to be said. Shakespeare, Balzac, Homer have all written about the same things, and if they had lived one thousand or two thousand years longer, the publishers wouldn't have needed anyone since.

There must be some Tommy Hilfiger event horizon, beyond which it is impossible to be more derivative, more removed from the source, more devoid of soul.

Whenever anybody whom we love dies, we discover that although death is commonplace it is terribly original. We may have thought about it all our lives, but if it comes close to us, it is quite a new, strange thing to us, for which we are entirely unprepared. It may, perhaps, not be the bare loss so much as the strength of the bond which is broken that is the surprise, and we are debtors in a way to death for revealing something in us which ordinary life disguises.

Fashion constantly begins and ends in the two things it abhors most, singularity and vulgarity.

Rules and models destroy genius and art.

The path of genius is free, and its own

Governments do not create, individuals create. Every invention was once just a thought inside someones head.

Genius… means little more than the faculty of perceiving in an unhabitual way.

there was probably something different about everybody and Karl's way of being different was no worse than anybody else's.

It's how creativity works. Especially in humans. For every good idea, ten thousand idiotic ones must first be posed, sifted, tried out, and discarded. A mind that's afraid to toy with the ridiculous will never come up with the brilliantly original.

You are a hedgehog, my friend. A walking, talking hedgehog.

Someone might ask, if the dynamic of innovation consists of schema and revision, where does true originality come from? Is there no single work we can point to as the ultimate source of this or that new storrytelling strategy? I'm inclined to say there is no such source. Artists working in mass art forms find originality by revising schemas in circulation, or by revising ones that have fallen into disuse.

Since 1941, according to his biographer Andrew Hodges, Turing had been watching his proto-computers and decided that originality and intuition were processes that could be computed.