Originality Quotes - Page 19

• Photography is a way of shouting, of freeing oneself, not of proving or asserting one's own originality. It's a way of life.

  Henri Cartier-Bresson

  Photography, Way, Shouting

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• Writers tend to consider distinction and originality as virtues, but they are anathema to publishers.

  Thomas M. Disch

  Writing, Virtue, Anathema

  Thomas M. Disch (2000). “The Dreams Our Stuff is Made Of: How Science Fiction Conquered the World”, p.211, Simon and Schuster

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• I've done really well so far in my career by trusting the audience to be as dissatisfied with convention as I am, as a film-goer. You want to go see a film that surprises you in some way.

  Christopher Nolan

  Careers, Done, Want

  Christopher Nolan, Jonah Nolan (2010). “Inception: The Shooting Script”, p.18, Insight Editions

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• The bad teacher imposes his ideas and his methods on his pupils, and such originality as they may have is lost in the second-rate art of imitation.

  Stephen Neill

  Teacher, Art, Teaching

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• May you discover your own special abilities and contribute them toward a better world.

  Charlene Costanzo

  Over You, Special, World

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• Last summer I was staying at a house in Hampshire which was famous for the brilliance and the originality of its gardens. There were many of them, but the most beautiful of all was a walled garden in which every flower was blue. There were all the obvious things like delphiniums and acronitums and larkspurs, but the most beautiful blue of all came from the groups of cabbages - the ordinary blue pickling cabbage. Set against the blazing blue of the other flowers, it had a bloom and elegance which made it a thing of the greatest delight.

  Beverley Nichols

  Beautiful, Summer, Flower

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• It is always better to be an original than an imitation.

  Theodore Roosevelt

  Imitation, Originals

  Theodore Roosevelt, Paul H. Jeffers (1998). “The Bully Pulpit: A Teddy Roosevelt Book of Quotations”, p.20, Taylor Trade Publications

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• Frivolity, under whatever form it appears, deprives attention of its power, thought of its originality, and sentiment of its depth.

  Madame de Stael

  Depth, Attention, Form

  "Corinne, or Italy". Book by Madame de Stael, 1807.

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• Originality will be rewarded in any line.

  Will Rogers

  Lines

  Will Rogers, James Smallwood, Steven K. Gragert (1980). “Will Rogers' Weekly Articles: The Harding”

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• Not like Homer would I write, Not like Dante if I might, Not like Shakespeare at his best, Not like Goethe or the rest, Like myself, however small, Like myself, or not at all.

  William Allingham

  Writing, Might, Ifs

  William Allingham (1884). “Blackberries picked off many bushes, by D. Pollex and others, put in a basket [verse, really written] by W. Allingham”

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• Originality is a thing we constantly clamour for, and constantly quarrel with; as if, observes our author himself, any originality but our own could be expected to content us! In fact all strange thing are apt, without fault of theirs, to estrange us at first view, and unhappily scarcely anything is perfectly plain, but what is also perfectly common.

  Thomas Carlyle

  Views, Firsts, Faults

  Thomas Carlyle, Henry Duff Traill (2010). “The Works of Thomas Carlyle”, p.11, Cambridge University Press

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• In my actual imaginative contact with life, I am vastly more responsive to beauty than to horror - indeed, I never experience real cosmic horror except in infrequent nightmares. However, when I come to record my various imaginative experiences, I generally find that only the horror items have any uniqueness or originality. Others have seen the same beautiful things that I have seen, & have sung them more nobly.

  H. P. Lovecraft

  Beautiful, Real, Records

  Letter to Elizabeth Toldridge (8 March 1929), in "Selected Letters II, 1925-1929" edited by August Derleth and Donald Wandrei, (pp. 316-317), 1968.

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• 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.

  Eric Hoffer

  Serious, Underestimate, Sensitivity

  "Eric Hoffer and the Art of the Notebook" by Tom Bethell in Harper's Magazine, July 2005.

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• I love the working class, and everyone from it that I've met, and think they're incredible witty, inventive - there's a lot of poetry there. A lot of rough stuff as well. What there is, too, is an awful lot of expressiveness and intelligence and originality down there. And a lot of thwarted intelligence.

  Martin Amis

  Witty, Thinking, Class

  "New New Yorker Martin Amis Talks Terrorism, Pornography, Idyllic Brooklyn and American Decline". Interview with David Wallace-Wells, www.vulture.com. July 22, 2012.

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• What you have felt and thought will by itself invent a new style, so that when people talk about style they are always a little astonished at the newness of it, because they think that it is only style that they are talking about, when what they are talking about is the attempt to express a new idea with such force that it will have the originality of the thought.It is an awfully lonesome business, and, as you know, I never wanted you to go into it, but if you are going into it at all, I want you to go into it knowing the sort of things that took me years to learn.

  F. Scott Fitzgerald

  Thinking, Talking, Years

  F. Scott Fitzgerald (2010). “A Life in Letters”, p.512, Simon and Schuster

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• I no longer find such pleasure in that preeminently good society, of which I was once so fond. It seems to me that beneath a cloak of clever talk it proscribes all energy, all originality. If you are not a copy, people accuse you of being ill-mannered.

  Stendhal

  Clever, People, Energy

  Stendhal (2015). “Armance”, p.72, Booklassic

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• Our debt to tradition through reading and conversation is so massive, our protest so rare and insignificant-and this commonly on the ground of other reading and hearing-that in large sense, one would say there is no pure originality. All minds quote. Old and new make the warp and woof of every moment. There is no thread that is not a twist of these two strands. By necessity, by proclivity, and by delight, we all quote. It is as difficult to appropriate the thoughts of others as it is to invent.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Reading, Two, Mind

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (1876). “Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson ...”, p.144

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• Tradition kills originality; you keep repeating the same things in tradition! Behave like the sky; always create new and different things; be original!

  Mehmet Murat Ildan

  Sky, Different, Tradition

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• Only through immitation do we develop toward originality.

  John Steinbeck

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• Originality is going back to origins.

  Antonio Gaudi

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• Originality is a concept possible only to a limited viewpoint.

  Robert Sheckley

  Viewpoints, Concepts

  Robert Sheckley (2014). “The Robot Who Looked Like Me: Stories”, p.14, Open Road Media

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• Detach the writer from the milieu where he has experienced his greatest sense of belonging, and you have created a discontinuity within his personality, a short circuit in his identity. The result is his originality, his creativity comes to an end. He becomes the one-book novelist or the one-trilogy writer.

  Henry Roth

  Book, Creativity, Personality

  1987 'The Eternal Plebeian and Other Matters', in Shifting Landscape.

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• Credentials have been a problem for a long time in my work. Originality has been my strength, and credentials and academia have not been.

  Budd Hopkins

  Long, Academia, Problem

  "Alien Discussions: Proceedings of the Abduction Study Conference". Book by Andrea Pritchard, p. 134, 1994.

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• Nast is an artist of uncommon abilities. His works evince originality of conception, freedom of manner, lofty appreciation of national ideas and action, and a large artistic instinct.

  James Jackson Jarves

  Appreciation, Artist, Ideas

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• To admire on principle is the only way to imitate without loss of originality.

  Samuel Taylor Coleridge

  Art, Philosophy, Loss

  Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1834). “Biographia Literaria: Or, Biographical Sketches of My Literary Life and Opinions”, p.58

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