#originality

We can never be entirely original, as artists or as people. The genius and vision of those who came before us is too great for us to digress from entirely. Though, as creatures that are compelled to test and surpass our own creative abilities, we must always strive for that originality in everything we do in order to move the world forward. ↗

— Jessica Lave

#artists #creativity #genius #originality #vision

When we reject our origins, we become the product of whatever soil that we find ourselves planted; the colors of our leaves change as we consume borrowed nutrients with borrowed roots and, like a tree, we grow. ↗

— Mike Norton

#heritage #originality #reject #rejection #tree

It is necessary to any originality to have the courage to be an amateur. ↗

— Wallace Stevens

#originality #courage

Literature for me… tries to heal the harm done by stories. (How much harm? Most of the atrocities of history have been created by stories, e.g., the Jews killed Jesus.) I follow Sartre that the freedom the author claims for herself must be shared with the reader. So that would mean that literature is stories that put themselves at the disposal of readers who want to heal themselves. Their healing power lies in their honesty, the freshness of their vision, the new and unexpected things they show, the increase in power and responsibility they give the reader. ↗

— Geoff Ryman

#freedom #freshness #healing #honesty #literature

Absurdity and anti—absurdity are the two poles of creative energy. ↗

— Karl Lagerfeld

#absurdity #anti-absurdity #art #bi #bipolar

Anymore, no one's mind is their own. ↗

— Chuck Palahniuk

#life #modernity #originality #life

The artist's duty is to defend the exceptional: the imagination. ↗

— Marty Rubin

#imagination #originality #art

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

#creativity #originality #point-of-view #uniqueness #writing

Well I won't argue about the matter. You always want to argue about things. That is exactly what things were originally made for. ↗

— Oscar Wilde

#originality

The mind that opens to a new idea never returns to its original size. ↗

— Albert Einstein

#new-ideas #open-mindedness #originality