#originality

Take a commonplace, clean it and polish it, light it so that it produces the same effect of youth and freshness and originality and spontaneity as it did originally, and you have done a poet's job. The rest is literature. ↗

— Jean Cocteau

#commonplace #did #done #effect #freshness

The principle mark of genius is not perfection but originality, the opening of new frontiers. ↗

— Arthur Koestler

#genius #mark #new #opening #originality

The prerequisite of originality is the art of forgetting, at the proper moment, what we know. ↗

— Arthur Koestler

#forgetting #know #moment #originality #prerequisite

Art builds upon art, builds upon art...nothing is purely original. We're all inspired by something...or someone. It's a never-ending chain of ideas...and it's magical. ↗

— Shannon Taylor Hodnett

#ideas #inspiration #magical #never-ending #originality

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

#gender #humor #men-and-women #originality #funny

Great artists are a little too gifted to be bound by boxes and labels, and in saying that, the label 'artist' is to be used lightly. ↗

— Criss Jami

#artists #bondage #boundaries #boxes #brilliance

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

#life #originality #imagination

When I came up, it was all about originality and collective research. There is an awful lot of imitation going on now. ↗

— Steve Lacy

#awful #came #collective #going #i

The burden of originality is one that most people don't want to accept. They'd rather sit in front of the TV and let that tell them what they're supposed to like, what they're supposed to buy, and what they're supposed to laugh at. ↗

— Marilyn Manson

#burden #buy #front #laugh #like

I did stand-up comedy for 18 years. Ten of those years were spent learning, four years were spent refining, and four years were spent in wild success. I was seeking comic originality, and fame fell on me as a byproduct. The course was more plodding than heroic. ↗

— Steve Martin

#comedy #comic #course #did #fame