"Books serve to show a man that those original thoughts of his aren't very new after all."
— Abraham Lincoln

"Nothing of me is original. I am the combined effort of everyone I've ever known."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Invisible Monsters)

"An original idea. That can't be too hard. The library must be full of them."
— Stephen Fry

"Anymore, no one's mind is their own."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Lullaby)

"Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void but out of chaos."
— Mary Shelley

"Conform, go crazy, or become an artist."
— Nancy Springer

"The unique must be fulfilled."
— Martha Graham

"I never set out to be weird. It was always other people who called me weird."
— Frank Zappa

"There is nothing new except what has been forgotten."
— Marie Antoinette

"Only those with no memory insist on their originality."
— Coco Chanel

"All truly wise thoughts have been thought already thousands of times; but to make them truly ours, we must think them over again honestly, till they take root in our personal experience."
— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

"If a man were to look over the fence on one side of his garden and observe that the neighbor on his left had laid his garden path round a central lawn; and were to look over the fence on the other side of his garden and observe that the neighbor on his right had laid his path down the middle of the lawn, and were then to lay his own garden path diagonally from one corner to the other, that man's soul would be lost. Originality is only to be praised when not prefaced by the look to right and left."
— Quentin Crisp (The Gormenghast Novels: Titus Groan, Gormenghast, Titus Alone)

"Our lack of originality is something we usefully forget as we hunch over our—to us—ever-fascinating lives. My friend M., leaving his wife for a younger woman, used to complain, “People tell me it’s a cliché. But it doesn’t feel like a cliché to me.” Yet it was, and is. As all our lives would prove, if we could see them from a greater distance—from the viewpoint, say, of that higher creature imagined by Einstein. "
— Julian Barnes (Nothing to Be Frightened Of)