123 Originality Quotes

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

`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.'

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!

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.

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

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

One, though he be excellent and the chief, is not to be imitated alone; for never no imitator ever grew up to his author; likeness is always on this side truth. Yet there happened in my time one noble speaker, who was full of gravity in his speaking; his language (where he could spare or pass by a jest) was nobly censorious. No man ever spake more neatly, more pressly, more weightily, or suffered less emptiness, less idleness, in what he uttered. No member of his speech but consisted of his own graces. His hearers could not cough, or look aside from him, without loss. He commanded where he spoke, and had his judges angry and pleased at his devotion. No man had their affections more in his power. The fear of every man that heard him was lest he should make an end.

Music has basically followed a shallow route for 50 years. People come along, do something really cool and different, everyone copies them, the original gets diluted, distorted, and eventually the diluted, in most cases, achieves more success than the thing that started it. And I kinda thought the alternative scene was gonna be different: We thought 'Brave new world!' So it's really weird to be competing against the imitators. It wasn't always comfortable competing against Nirvana, and it was certainly not healthy living under that shadow at times. But at least there was honor in it. We always respected that it was a great band - Pearl Jam too. But competing against Bush?! It's nothing to get your dick hard about, you know what i mean? There's no mojo in that!

'I love Christina Aguilera! She`s completely original. She`s great, she takes chances. She's unapologetic. (Rita Wilson)

I think they've always gone on. I've gotten some irate letters from oldsters saying 'We did this in the 1930s. You didn't invent anything.' And I'm like, 'Gramps, you should have put a name on it and sold it, because that's all I did.'

nothing is quite as easy as using words like somebody else. We all of us do exactly this nearly all of the time -and whenever we do it, we are not poets.

There comes Poe, with his Raven, like Barnaby Rudge, Three-fifths of him genius, and two-fifths sheer fudge.

He was a unique artist - an original in an era of imitators.

'That the prime exponent of this new style of music should be a singer who possessed no prior professional experience was an anomaly; (in fact), not only were most of the mannerisms that would define his vocal style present at the creation - from the sudden swoops in register to the habit, derived from gospel singing, of starting his lines with a throat-clearing 'well' that gave whatever followed the feeling of a retort, but what was even more impressive was the extent to which his first professional recording was marked by the trait that has characterized every great popular singer: the absolute assertion of his personality over the song; from this, it might be concluded that Presley was simply a 'natural.', but the truth, as ever, was more complex than that'

'The voice of Elvis Presley is perhaps the most contested acoustical phenomenon in modern culture. I can understand why some listeners may prefer the original versions (of R&B artists) to Presley's covers, but it is more difficult to claim that these were immoral or unethical. In terms of vocal style and instrumental arrangement, Presley actually borrows relatively little, his appropriations (being) more straightforward, taking from the materials already protected by copyright: lyrics and melody. So, unless he can be criticized for not imitating an original R&B artist's rendition, we have to reevaluate Elvis' transgressions'

Originality is not something continuous but something intermittent - a flash of the briefest duration. One must have the time and be watchful (be attuned) to catch the flash and fix it. One must know how to catch and preserve these scant flakes of gold sluiced out of the sand and rocks of everyday life. Originality does not come nugget-size.

The ambition of the Irish is to say a thing as everybody says it, only louder.

The surrealists still see things as everyone sees them, they complicate them in a different way but the vision is that of everyone else, in short the complication is the complication of the twentieth century but the vision is that of the nineteenth century. Picasso only sees something else, another reality. Complications are always easy but another vision than that of all the world is very rare.

I was approached to do a film script for the Beatles. I said it would have to be an absolutely original script. Paul McCartney said do whatever you like. I said that means you'll never be able to do it.

In all base schools of art, the craftsman is dependent for his bread on originality; that is to say, on finding in himself some fragment of isolated faculty, by which his work may be distinct from that of other men. We are ready enough to take delight in our little doings, without any such stimulus; - what must be the effect of the popular applause which continually suggests that the little thing we can separately do is as excellent as it is singular; and what the effect of the bribe, held out to us through the whole of life, to produce - it being also in our peril not to produce - something different from the work of our neighbors?

Que cada hombre construya su propia catedral. ?Para que vivir de obras de arte ajenas y antiguas?

Didn't I once observe that there is nothing new under the sun?

Kate journeys into new and exciting territories. She is an original in a music world dominated by cover versions, regressive movements and identikit superstars. The direct opposite of the archetypal rock star: compulsively introvert in a world of screaming extraverts, middle-class and deeply English amid England's all-pervasive working class American ethos, boldly feminine in rock's macho climate. Her melodic genius and articulate lyrics make the rest seem moronically simplistic.

I had always considered Kate Bush truly original both as a performer and as a songwriter with an unusually fresh sense of harmony. If her new album next month is awaited with some excitement after a long fallow period, then in 1985 it was assumed that Hounds of Love would be something of a final fling at the conclusion of a waning career. I soon realised how wrong this assumption was when Kate sent me a cassette: it was zany, ambitious and yet utterly Kate Bush, but with gaps where I was to do her bidding. Having chatted at length, she sent me a long letter with the words of the song and precise instructions on how it should unfold... Structure was carefully delineated, verses and choruses written out fully and marked up in colour, and she talked of the sound quality in the most graphic terms.

At around an hour and a half, Aerial is unquestionably a substantial piece of work, and its manifold peculiarities and quirks offer much more interesting fare than that available from today's AOR mainstream. It's also a more mature undertaking than any of her previous albums, an extended meditation on art and light, fame and family, creativity and the natural world. Indeed it seems, come to think of it, like an expansion of the theme of Laura Veirs' gorgeous 'Rapture'. And since that was the finest song of last year, I'd have to say that leaves Kate Bush still operating at the cutting-edge of intelligent adult pop, every bit as relevant now as at any point in her career. Just a little bit weirder, thank heavens.

Kin Hubbard is dead. To us folks that attempt to write a little humor his death is just like Edison's would be to the world of invention. No man in our generation was within a mile of him, and I am so glad that I didn't wait for him to go to send flowers. I have said it from the stage and in print for twenty years. Just think- only two lines a day, yet he expressed more original philosophy in 'em than all the rest of the paper combined. What a kick Twain and all that gang will get out of Kin.

My first reading of Tolstoy affected me as a revelation from heaven, as the trumpet of the judgment. What he made me feel was not the desire to imitate, but the conviction that imitation was futile.

You see. I don't think any new thoughts. I think thoughts that other people have thought, and I rearrange them. But Sara, she thinks thoughts that never were before.

I've seen the little tidal waves that I've caused in the music industry, and how people are becoming more evolved in their images. And there are a lot of new Marilyn Manson-esque people, but I don't get mad at those things. It's like there's one real Santa Claus, but there's a lot of fake ones at the mall.

Goodman: Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. Kael: I hate it. It is very creepy being imitated.

Genius borrows nobly. When Shakespeare is charged with debts to his authors, Landor replies: 'Yet he was more original than his originals. He breathed upon dead bodies and brought them into life.'

I would just look at Harrison; he would do stuff and I would not mimic it, but interpret it younger. Mimicking is a terrible mistake that many people make when they play someone younger, or with an age difference. Mimicking doesn't interpret true because you can't just edit it around.

The vision of the artist or the poet is the intermediate determinant between the subject (the person) and the objective pole (the world-waiting-to-be). It will be nonbeing until the poet's struggle brings forth an answer - meaning. The greatness of a poem or a painting is not that it portrays the thing observed or experienced, but that it portrays the artist's or the poet's vision cued off by his encounter with the reality. Hence the poem or the painting is unique, original, never to be duplicated. No matter how many times Monet returned to paint the cathedral at Rouen, each canvas was a new painting expressing a new vision.

It's already getting more and more difficult to make an ambitious and original film. There are less and less independent producers or independent companies and an increasing number of corporations who are more interested in balance sheets than in artistic achievement. They want to make a killing each time they produce a film. They're only interested in the lowest common denominator because they're trying to reach the widest audience. And you got some kind of entropy. That's the danger; they look more alike, those films. The style is all melting and it all looks the same. Even young directors- for most of them, their only standard of achievement is how well their films do on the first weekend or whatever. It worries me. But then, from time to time, you have a film like The Usual Suspects or.... I'm trying to think of something American with some kind of originality... Pulp Fiction.

You know, whenever you do something new and original, people run to see it because it's different. Then, if it happens to be successful, the studios rush to imitate it. It becomes commonplace right away. But it's been like that before, I think. Now, the stakes are so gigantic that they cut each other's throats. So if most of the films are failures, then those that succeed so spectacularly, so commercially, become the norm. It's like a roulette for the studios. The problem with it is that it becomes more and more of a committee. Before, you dealt with the studio. It had one or two persons and now you have masses of executives who have to justify their existence and write so-called 'creative notes' and have creative meetings. They obsess about the word creative probably because they aren't.

Lots of comedians have people they try to mimic. I mimic my shadow.

Ainsi presque tout est imitation. L'idee des Lettres persanes est prise de celle de l'Espion turc. Le Boiardo a imite le Pulci, l'Arioste a imite le Boiardo. Les esprits les plus originaux empruntent les uns des autres.

I've never believed in doing sequels. I didn't want to waste the time I have doing a sequel; I'd rather be using that time doing something new and different.

My writing is careless, but all through it is something that is good, that is mine alone, that no other writer could ever achieve.

As if his whole vocation Were endless imitation.

Here am I, the often sat on Dancing don; my name is T-TT-N; Like old wine in a new bottle Is my talk on Aristotle.

Imitation of life. Mimesis. That's all I am. Plato said we were all shadows. Me more than most

I will call I've heard that line before No you haven't. That's the guy's line, so I know you haven't heard it, and I don't think you've even said it

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

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

Self-plagiarism is style.

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

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

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

Plagiarists, at least, have the merit of preservation.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

'Good composers don't borrow, they steal'

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

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

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.

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

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)

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

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.

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

Originality is merely an illusion.