#originality

Originality is the one thing which unoriginal minds cannot feel the use of. ↗

— John Stuart Mill

#feel #minds #one thing #originality #the one thing

Originality consists in trying to be like everybody else and failing. ↗

— Raymond Radiguet

#else #everybody #everybody else #failing #like

But the French writers always had more originality and independence than others, and that regulator, which elsewhere was religion, long since ceased to exist for them. ↗

— Henryk Sienkiewicz

#ceased #elsewhere #exist #french #had

Is it possible to say "It was a beautiful morning at the end of November" without feeling like Snoopy? ↗

— Umberto Eco

#originality #stereotypes #writing #beauty

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

#insulation #islands #isolation #life #originality

Originality, not Intelligence, is the sign of a brilliant Author. All the Education in the world won't help someone who can't think for themselves. ↗

— A.M. Sawyer

#originality #education

You can't hate the roots of a tree and not hate the tree. ↗

— Malcolm X

#origins #racism #roots #originality

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

#funny #humor #individuality #originality #reading

Originality depends only on the character of the drawing and the vision peculiar to each artist. ↗

— Georges Seurat

#character #depends #drawing #each #only

For people never say anything the same way twice; no two of them ever say it the same. The greatest imaginative writer that ever brooded in a lavender robe and a mellowed briar in his teeth, couldn't tell you, though e try for a lifetime, how the simplest strap-hanger will ask the conductor to be let off at the next stop. ... It is all for the taking. All the manuals by frustrated fictioneers on how to write can't give you the first syllable of reality, at any cot, that any common conversation can. All the classics, read and re-read, can't help you catch the ring of truth as does the word heard first-hand. ↗

— Nelson Algren

#originality #truth #writers #writing #imagination