Selected originality quotes

1. Do not quench your inspiration and your imagination; do not become the slave of your model.

2. The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources.

3. It is comparatively easy to become a writer; staying a writer, resisting formulaic work, generating one's own creativity - that's a much tougher matter.

4. A sequel is an admission that you've been reduced to imitating yourself.

5. Sometimes I pick up a book and I say: Well, so you've written it first, have you? Good for you. O.K., then I won't have to write it.

6. The secret is to follow the advice the masters give you in their works while doing something different from them.

7. Vulgarity is, in reality, nothing but a modern, chic, pert descendant of the goddess Dullness.

8. To overestimate the originality of one's thoughts is perhaps a less serious defect than being unaware of their newness. There is a more pronounced lack of sensitivity in underestimating (ourselves and others) than in overestimating.

9. Some people have no original ideas because they do not think well enough of themselves to consider their ideas worth noticing and developing.

10. Commonplace people have an answer for everything and nothing ever surprises them. They try to look as though they knew what you were about to say better than you did yourself, and when it is their turn to speak, they repeat with great assurance something that they have heard other people say, as though it were their own invention.

11. Original thought is like original sin: both happened before you were born to people you could not have possibly met.

12. When I start writing a poem, I don't think about models or about what anybody else in the world has done.

13. There is nothing more difficult for a truly creative painter than to paint a rose, because before he can do so he has first to forget all the roses that were ever painted.

14. A young painter who cannot liberate himself from the influence of past generations is digging his own grave.

15. Originality is not seen in single words or even in sentences. Originality is the sum total of a man's thinking or his writing.

16. The greatness of art is not to find what is common but what is unique.

17. Great things are not accomplished by those who yield to trends and fads and popular opinion.

18. The eager or dutiful persons who subject themselves to these tidal waves of the classics and the moderns find everything wonderful in an absent-minded way. The wonder washes over them rather than into them, and one of its effects is to make anything shocking or odd suddenly interesting enough to gain a month's celebrity. And so another by-product of our come-one, come-all policy is the tendency to reward cleverness, not art, and to put one more hurdle in the path of the truly original artist.

19. Nature, they say, doth dote, And cannot make a man Save on some worn-out plan, Repeating us by rote.

20. I've been imitated so well I've heard people copy my mistakes.

21. That's one thing that's always, like, been a difference between, like, the performing arts, and being a painter, you know. A painter does a painting, and he paints it, and that's it, you know. He has the joy of creating it, it hangs on a wall, and somebody buys it, and maybe somebody buys it again, or maybe nobody buys it and it sits up in a loft somewhere until he dies. But he never, you know, nobody ever, nobody ever said to Van Gogh, 'Paint a Starry Night again, man!' You know? He painted it and that was it.

22. It has been observed before that images, however beautiful, though faithfully copied from nature, and as accurately represented in words, do not of themselves characterize the poet. They become proofs of original genius only as far as they are modified by a predominant passion; or by associated thoughts or images awakened by that passion; or when they have the effect of reducing multitude to unity, or succession to an instant; or lastly, when a human and intellectual life is transferred to them from the poet's spirit.

23. My chief virtue (or if you like, defect) has been a tireless lifelong search for an original, individual musical idiom. I detest imitation, I detest hackneyed devices.

24. The finest minds seem to be formed rather by efforts at original thinking, by endeavours to form new combinations, and to discover new truths, than by passively receiving the impressions of other men's ideas.

25. Thou art a retailer of phrases, and dost deal in remnants of remnants.

26. If you can't imitate him, don't copy him.

27. Genius is essentially creative; it bears the stamp of the individual who possesses it.

28. Always be yourself, express yourself, have faith in yourself; do not go out and look for a successful personality and duplicate it.

29. Delsarte tells me that Mozart stole outrageously from Galuppi, in the same way, I suppose, that Moliere stole from anybody anywhere, if he found something work taking. I said that what was Mozart had not been stolen from Galuppi, or from anyone else for that matter.

30. Posterity weaves no garlands for imitators.

31. To do the opposite of something is also a form of imitation, namely an imitation of its opposite.

32. The great rule: If the little bit you have is nothing special in itself, at least find a way of saying it that is a little bit special.

33. I think the crucial thing in the writing career is to find what you want to do and how you fit in. What somebody else does is of no concern whatever except as an interesting variation.

34. Though old the thought and oft expressed, 'Tis his at last who says it best.

35. No ideas and the ability to express them- that's a journalist.

36. `Second freshness - that's what is nonsense! There is only one freshness - the first - and it is also the last. And if sturgeon is of the second freshness, that means it is simply rotten.'

37. No one wants my painting because it is different from other people's - peculiar, crazy public that demands the greatest possible degree of originality on the painter's part and yet won't accept him unless his work resembles that of the others!

38. The imitator dooms himself to hopeless mediocrity. The inventor did it because it was natural to him, and so in him it has a charm. In the imitator something else is natural, and he bereaves himself of his own beauty, to come short of another man's.

39. Immortality. I notice that as soon as writers broach this question they begin to quote. I hate quotation. Tell me what you know.

40. Next to the originator of a good sentence is the first quoter of it.

41. The Republicans have a 'me too' candidate running on a 'yes but' platform, advised by a 'has been' staff.

42. History is a gallery of pictures in which there are few originals and many copies.

43. Self-plagiarism is style.

44. The science of pure mathematics, in its modern developments, may claim to be the most original creation of the human spirit.

45. 'The more original a discovery, the more obvious it seems afterward.'

46. 'The principle mark of genius is not perfection but originality, the opening of new frontiers.'

47. Plagiarists, at least, have the merit of preservation.

48. I have a scoop for you. I stole his act. I camouflaged it with punchlines, and to really throw people off, I did it before he did.

49. So far no one had had enough courage and intelligence to reveal me to my dear Germans. My problems are new, my psychological horizon frighteningly comprehensive, my language bold and clear; there may well be no books written in German which are richer in ideas and more independent than mine.

50. They say Allen got something from the Marx Brothers. He got nothing. Maybe twenty years ago, he might have been inspired. Today he's an original. The best, the funniest.

51. 'My strategy has always been do something that is hard to follow.'

52. It was a very great challenge for Heath. He's extremely original, extremely frightening, tremendously edgy. A very young character, a very anarchic presence that taps into a lot of our basic fears and panic.

53. If you can speak what you will never hear, if you can write what you will never read, you have done rare things.

54. 'Good composers don't borrow, they steal'

55. An original artist is unable to copy. So he has only to copy in order to be original.

56. Originality consists in trying to be like everybody else - and failing.

57. Sibelius is unquestionably a leader in the front rank of symphonic composers. He has got out of the ruts worn by his predecessors far more completely than Brahms got away from Beethoven, or even Richard Strauss from Wagner. If someone would only burn Finlandia he would come to our young people as an entirely original inventor of a new art form and a new harmony technique.

58. What wise or stupid thing can man conceive That was not thought of in ages long ago?

59. The challenge for me is still to do something that hasn't been beaten into the moviegoing consciousness. Otherwise what am I in it for?' (2004)

60. I believe in my conscience I intercept many a thought which heaven intended for another man.

61. I was determined to avoid the 'hero as self-aware damaged person' paradigm. I'm afraid as a reader I got sick of all the depressed and miserable alcoholics that increasingly peopled the genre.

62. He was the only musician who ever lived, who can't be replaced by someone.

63. Originality is merely an illusion.

64. Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.

65. Good artists copy. Great artists steal.

66. One cannot conceive anything so strange and so implausible that it has not already been said by one philosopher or another.

67. Heinlein presents us, in terms of his sources and influences with a rope of many strands and the strength of the whole is in the multiplicity of the strands. To lift one strand out and examine it has two immediate effects: it magnifies the relative importance out of proportion to its place in the whole; and it weakens the whole. For all the good and interesting use Heinlein made of his encounter with Cabell, he was not a disciple or even a 'Cabell minor.' Rather, he used Cabellian materials to make his own figure in the world, and in so doing he has given the Biography of the Life of Manuel a Life of its own, flowing into literary history. Imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery - but in literature, transformation is the only form of progeny.

68. It's a miracle... sparkles like an electric dream. Freshness, originality... that seduces you into loving motorcycles, as tender in their pistons as the petals in the Buddah's dawn lotus.

69. Lines slip easily down the accustomed grooves. The old designs are copied so glibly that we are half inclined to think them original, save for that very glibness.