Quotes About Originality

Ninety percent of all music is always crap, and when too many people decide they're going to have guitar bands, then ninety percent of them are going to be crap. It's just a given law.

I would hope very much that the converse of that myth isn't true - that one does not have to be nuts to be creative.

Creativity doesn't "improve.

You have to utilize who you are in your work. Nobody else can do that: nobody else can pull from your background, from your parents, your upbringing, your whole life experience.

We'll never get them to notice us if we say ordinary things in an ordinary way.

What would you call yourself if you didn't use anyone or anything else's associations to label you?

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

The goal of life is to take everything that made you weird as a kid and get people to pay you money for it when you're older.

Those Greeks and Romans," he protested, "they are so overrated. They only said everything first. I've said just as good things myself. But they got in before me."3

Those Greeks and Romans," he protested, "they are so overrated. They only said everything first. I've said just as good things myself. But they got in before me.

You are indebted to you imagination for three-fourths of your importance.

Freedom is our ability to make things up just for the sake of being able to do so.

all real progress in social science has been rooted in the courage to say things that are, in the final analysis, slightly ridiculous:

CONFUSE the Google Street View car by running alongside it dressed as a house.

Led Zeppelin created their music from a diet of Bert Jansch, Memphis Minnie, John Fahey, Billy Fury, Phil Spector, Richard 'Rabbit' Brown, Moby Grape, Manitas De Plata and Om Kalsoum. Those who came afterwards were content with a diet of Led Zeppelin, which is not the same thing at all.

The moment you cheat for the sake of beauty, you know you're an artist.

The moment you cheat for the sake of beauty,you know you're an artist.

Crazy and insane are words used throughout history to describe people and ideas that are simply different.

Those who are different, also have a tendency to think differently.

Blomkvist had heard this line before. He had even spoken to an old lady who claimed that it was actually she who had written the Harry Potter books and that J. K. Rowling had stolen everything by telepathy.

You have to be deviant if you're going to do anything new.

There is no off position on the genius

What do we mean - it is a common term of praise - when we say that a book is "original"? Not, usually, that the writer has invented something without precedent, but that she has made us "perceive" what we already, in a conceptual sense, "know", by deviating from the conventional, habitual ways of representing reality. Defamiliarization, in short, is another word for "originality". I shall have recourse to it again in these glances at the art of fiction.

Falling in love is thus the most conformist method of being an individual. Conversely, falling in love is the most original and spontaneous way to conform, perhaps the only way of conforming to social demands that will never make you look like a conformist. It is the one way that you can behave like everyone else and still claim, at the same time, that you did it your way.