Quotes About Originality

“Nothing of me is original. I am the combined effort of everyone I've ever known.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Invisible Monsters

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

“An original idea. That can't be too hard. The library must be full of them.”
― Stephen Fry

“I never set out to be weird. It was always other people who called me weird.”
― Frank Zappa

“Only those with no memory insist on their originality.”
― Coco Chanel

“All my best thoughts were stolen by the ancients.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.”
― T.S. Eliot, The Sacred Wood

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

“You have to do stuff that average people don't understand because those are the only good things.”
― Andy Warhol

“There is nothing new except what has been forgotten.”
― Marie Antoinette

“True rebels hate their own rebellion. They know by experience that it is not a cool and glamorous lifestyle; it takes a courageous fool to say things that have not been said and to do things that have not been done.”
― Criss Jami, Venus in Arms

“Anymore, no one's mind is their own.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Lullaby

“A facility for quotation covers the absence of original thought.”
― Dorothy L. Sayers, Gaudy Night

“Conform, go crazy, or become an artist.”
― Nancy Springer

“He: "Whale you be my valentine?" She: "Dolphinitely.”
― Adam Young

“The unique must be fulfilled.”
― Martha Graham

“Because even among contrarians, I’m a contrarian. But all of this is just words of bronze, third place rhetoric. What do I really mean when I say we want to shock society into awareness? Do we mean we want more originality and individuality? Less TV, more reading, writing, actual thinking? Less sheep, more shepherd pie? Yes, yes, and a little more pie, please. Oh, and some more sweet tea, too”
― Jarod Kintz, I Should Have Renamed This

“I refuse to believe that Hendrix had the last possessed hand,
that Joplin had the last drunken throat,
that Morrison had the last enlightened mind.”
― Patti Smith

“Absurdity and anti—absurdity are the two poles of creative energy.”
― Karl Lagerfeld

“Every story has already been told. Once you've read Anna Karenina, Bleak House, The Sound and the Fury, To Kill a Mockingbird and A Wrinkle in Time, you understand that there is really no reason to ever write another novel. Except that each writer brings to the table, if she will let herself, something that no one else in the history of time has ever had."

[Commencement Speech; Mount Holyoke College, May 23, 1999]”
― Anna Quindlen

“No man, proclaimed Donne , is an Island, and he was wrong. If we were not islands, we would be lost, drowned in each other's tragedies. We are insulated (a word that means, literally, remember, made into an island ) from the tragedy of others, by our island nature, and by the repetitive shape and form of the stories. The shape does not change: there was a human being who was born, lived, and then, by some means or another, died. There. You may fill in the details from your own experience. As unoriginal as any other tale, as unique as any other life. Lives are snowflakes-forming patterns we have seen before, as like one another as peas in a pod (and have you ever looked at peas in a pod? I mean, really looked at them? There's not a chance you'd mistake one for another, after a minute's close inspection), but still unique.”
― Neil Gaiman, American Gods

“A poor original is better than a good imitation.”
― Ella Wheeler Wilcox

“He was no longer quite sure whether anything he had ever thought or felt was truly his own property, or whether his thoughts were merely a common part of the world’s store of ideas which had always existed ready-made and which people only borrowed, like books from a library.”
― Milan Kundera, Life is Elsewhere

“I would rather be an artist than a leader. Ironically, a leader has to follow the rules.”
― Criss Jami, Venus in Arms

“All novels are sequels; influence is bliss.”
― Michael Chabon

“Nowadays, all a man can do to be original is to cite the earliest known quote on that subject. Women, though, have no problem being original. In fact, women are always being original. I constantly have to tell my wife to stop talking so much nonsense.”
― Benson Bruno

“The small are always dependent on the great; they are "small" precisely because they think they are independent. The great thinker is one who can hear what is greatest in the work of other "greats" and who can transform it in an original manner.”
― Martin Heidegger

“We are all feeding from each other, all the time, every day.”
― Dave Eggers, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius

“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

“No one ever discovered anything new by coloring inside the lines.”
― Thomas Vasquez