Quotes about Originality

I know of nothing more valuable, when it comes to the all-important virtue of authenticity, than simply being who you are.

The counterfeit innovator is wildly self-confident. The real one is scared to death.

If you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without every having noticed it.

If you're just going to be like everyone else, why are you even doing this?

When you just copy and paste, you miss that. You just repurpose the last layer instead of understanding all the layers underneath.

It seems stupid to have discovered America only to make it into a copy of another country.

Another unsettling element in modern art is that common symptom of immaturity, the dread of doing what has been done before.

Original! We're all as like each other as those dolls cut out of the same folded paper. We're like patterns stenciled on a wall. Can't you and I strike out for ourselves, May?

It seems so to me, said his wife, as if she were producing a new thought.

Undine was fiercely independent and yet passionately imitative. She wanted to surprise every one by her dash and originality, but she could not help modelling herself on the last person she met, and the confusion of ideals thus produced caused her much perturbation when she had to choose between two courses.

What is originality in art? Perhaps it is easier to define what it is not and this may be done by saying that it is never a willful rejection of what has been accepted as the necessary laws of various forms of art. Thus in reasoning originality relies not in discarding the necessary laws of thought, but in using them to express new intellectual conceptions. In poetry originality consists not in discarding the necessary laws of rhythm but in finding new rhythms within the limits of those laws.

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