When you are convinced that what you offer is yours, whether it be mediocre or of standard quality, your originality will make people love you in a way you did not expect.

Some writers confuse authenticity, which they ought always to aim at, with originality, which they should never bother about.

When you start searching for __ure elements_ in literature you will find that literature has been created by the following classes of persons: Inventors. Men who found a new process, or whose extant work gives us the first known example of a process. The masters. Men who combined a number of such processes, and who used them as well as or better than the inventors. The diluters. Men who came after the first two kinds of writer, and couldn__ do the job quite as well. Good writers without salient qualities. Men who are fortunate enough to be born when the literature of a given country is in good working order, or when some particular branch of writing is __ealthy_. For example, men who wrote sonnets in Dante__ time, men who wrote short lyrics in Shakespeare__ time or for several decades thereafter, or who wrote French novels and stories after Flaubert had shown them how. Writers of belles-lettres. That is, men who didn__ really invent anything, but who specialized in some particular part of writing, who couldn__ be considered as __reat men_ or as authors who were trying to give a complete presentation of life, or of their epoch. The starters of crazes.Until the reader knows the first two categories he will never be able __o see the wood for the trees_. He may know what he __ikes_. He may be a __ompleat book-lover_, with a large library of beautifully printed books, bound in the most luxurious bindings, but he will never be able to sort out what he knows to estimate the value of one book in relation to others, and he will be more confused and even less able to make up his mind about a book where a new author is __reaking with convention_ than to form an opinion about a book eighty or a hundred years old.He will never understand why a specialist is annoyed with him for trotting out a second- or third-hand opinion about the merits of his favourite bad writer.

Literature is language charged with meaning

There is a great tendency today to want everybody to write just the way everybody else does, to see and to show the same things in the same way to the same middling audience. But the writer, in order best to use the talents he has been given, has to write at his own intellectual level. For him to do anything else is to bury his talents. This doesn't mean that, within his limitations, he shouldn't try to reach as many people as possible, but it does mean that he must not lower his standards to do so.

Be yourself. An original is always worth more than a copy.