Quotes About Originality

Quit dwelling on other people's stories and make up some of your own.

Then quit dwelling on other people's stories and make up some of your own.

Alex Anderson

Alex Anderson

At an academic conference I learned the old adage that everything has been said, but not everyone has said it.

I am a princess. I do not follow fashions--I make them.

Yes, everything's been written, but also, the thing you want to write, before you wrote it, was impossible to write. Otherwise it would already exist. Your writing makes it possible.

A collection like a circus of daredevils, but with the determined charm of a Chinese drag queen making her home in Iowa. Siasoco takes us on a trip through the world we know by way of characters I've not seen in fiction before, or at least, not enough of--characters with stories I have been waiting for. A bravura debut.

Now I design what I want to wear, and it works that way.

True wit is nature to advantage dressed, / What oft was thought, but ne'er so well expressed.

True wit is nature to advantage dressed; What oft was thought, but ne'er so well expressed.

True wit is Nature to advantage dress'd, What oft was thought, but ne'er so well express'd.

If you meet life squarely, you are likely to make mistakes, do things you wish you hadn't, say things you wish you could retract or phrase more felicitously, and, in short, fumble your way along. Those "mature" people whose lives are even without a single sour note or a single mistake, who never fumble, manage only at the cost of original thought and original action. They do without the successes as well as the failures.

Society will develop a new kind of servitude which covers the surface of society with a network of complicated rules, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate. It does not tyrannise but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.

One pays a price for innovation, and innovators, knowing this, are hardly conciliators: books are not written specifically to please others; they are written, like it or not, to please oneself.

When Ford sells a car, a dealer isn't allowed to take out the engine and put a different one in. When a newsstand sells the Washington Post, no one can go to the newsstand and pay them to rip out the classified section and put their own classified section in - if they could, they would do so.

You can't be different for different's sake, and this doesn't always work, but you have to separate yourself from the normal read. Of course, it has to be truthful. If it's not truthful, don't waste your time.

It's not like what I do or what I wear is my copyright. What I'm wearing now also is an inspiration. It is how I saw it on the mannequin, and I just wore it, so it's in a way copied. But obviously, I wouldn't want to spend my life thinking about dresses. It is such a waste of life.

To be in a band, at least according to the rules of rock in the 1970s, one must know how to play an instrument. But rather than waste time solving that problem, No Wavers ignored it. The point was simply to make music, not to learn how first.

I feel like I'm wasting time if I repeat myself.

I mean, if we try to 'fluff up' 'Nikita?' We're done. If we try to 'fluff' 'Nikita,' I don't want to be involved and I don't want to watch the show.

If you go back and watch 'The French Connection,' it's been cannibalized so many times. There are certain movies like that, where you see the original and think, 'This isn't so great.' And the reason it isn't so great is because everyone has copied it.

Make the videos that you want to watch. Don't think about who is going to be upset or offended.

I want to make videos that, if I didn't know myself, I'd want to watch. As long as I'm making myself laugh, I'm usually having a good time. That's how I know I've made a video that I'm proud of: I've made myself laugh.