originality quotes

Le talent provient de l'originalite  , qui est une manie'  re spe  ciale de penser, de voir, de comprendre et de juger. Talent comes from originality which is a special manner of thinking, of seeing, of understanding and of judging.

- Guy de Maupassant
  Pierre et  Jean, pre  face.

Derivative writers seem versatile because they imitate many others, past and present. Artistic originality has only itself to copy.

-Vladimir Nabokov
  Interview in the Paris Review, Summer.

All my originality consists†in giving life in human fashion to beings which are impossible according to the laws of possibility.

- Odilon Redon
Quoted in Edward Lucie-Smith Symbolist Art (1972).

Detach the writer from the milieu where he has experienced his greatest sense of belonging, and you have created a discontinuity within his personality, a short circuit in his identity. The result is his originality, his creativity comes to an end. He becomes the one-book novelist or the one-trilogy writer.

- Henry Roth
  'The Eternal Plebeian and Other Matters', in Shifting Landscape.

A man of great common sense and good taste, meaning thereby a man without originality or moral courage.

- George Bernard Shaw
 Of Caesar. Caesar and Cleopatra, notes.