The most exhausting thing in life is being insincere.
We are so accustomed to disguise ourselves to others that in the end we become disguised to ourselves.
Always be a first-rate version of yourself.
Always be a first-rate version of yourself, instead of a second-rate version of somebody else.
Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas 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 ever having noticed it.
Books serve to show a man that those original thoughts of his aren't very new at all.
Nothing of me is original. I am the combined effort of everyone I've ever known.
Be what you are. This is the first step toward becoming better than you are.
If you do not express your own original ideas, if you do not listen to your own being, you will have betrayed yourself.
Once conform, once do what others do because they do it, and a kind of lethargy steals over all the finer senses of the soul.
Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. Devour old films, new films, music, books, paintings, photographs, poems, dreams, random conversations, architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water, light and shadows. Select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul. If you do this, your work (and theft) will be authentic.
Select only things to steal that speak directly to your soul. If you do this, your work (and theft) will be authentic. Authenticity is invaluable; originality is nonexistent
Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination.
One essential ingredient for being an original in the day of copies is courageous vision.
I've always been obsessed with drums. They fascinate me. Any other instrument - nothing. I play acoustic guitar a bit. But it's always been drums first and foremost. I don't reckon on this Jack-of-all-trades thing. I thing that felling is a lot more important than technique. It's all very well doing a triple paradiddle - but who's going to know you've done it? If you play technically you sound like everybody else. It's being original that counts.
Pretension almost always overdoes the original, and hence exposes itself.
The masses have no habit of self-reliance or original action.
I find that the very things that I get criticized for, which is usually being different and just doing my own thing and just being original, is the very thing that's making me successful.
A writer does not own words any more than a painter owns colors. So lets dispense with this originality fetish… Look, listen and transcribe and forget about being original.
Originality is a thing we constantly clamour for, and constantly quarrel with.
or simply:
