originality

originality and a feeling of one's own dignity are achieved only through work and struggle.

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.

It's not what you lift, it's where you carry it.

I think the writer is initially set going by literature more than by life. When there are many writers all employing the same idiom, all looking out on more or less the same social scene, the individual writer will have to be more than ever careful that he isn't just doing badly what has already been done to completion. The presence alone of Faulkner in our midst makes a great difference in what the writer can and cannot permit himself to do. Nobody wants his mule and wagon stalled on the same track the Dixie Limited is roaring down.

If it aint broke, break it. Then build something better.

With cold eyes and indifferent mind the spectators regard the work. Connoissers admire the "skill" (as one admires a tightrope walker), enjoy the "quality of painting" (as one enjoys a pasty). But hungry souls go hungry away. The vulgar herd stroll through the rooms and pronounce the pictures "nice" or "splendid." Those who could speak have said nothing, those who could hear have heard nothing.

There is nothing higher-class than real craftsmanship, diversity, originality and the service of skilled human hands.

No original thought still exists. People are original, each one of them. The same ideas that others had before you are waiting for you to bring them back to life in a new way. The part of who you are that is left behind within these old ideas is what makes them original all over again.

Artistry, perhaps, is at its core being able to control change in interesting ways.

Insanity is coasting through life in a miserable existence when you have a caged lion locked inside and the key to release it.

Up until relatively recently, creating original characters from scratch wasn't a major part of an author's job description. When Virgil wrote The Aeneid, he didn't invent Aeneas; Aeneas was a minor character in Homer's Odyssey whose unauthorized further adventures Virgil decided to chronicle. Shakespeare didn't invent Hamlet and King Lear; he plucked them from historical and literary sources. Writers weren't the originators of the stories they told; they were just the temporary curators of them. Real creation was something the gods did.All that has changed. Today the way we think of creativity is dominated by Romantic notions of individual genius and originality, and late-capitalist concepts of intellectual property, under which artists are businesspeople whose creations are the commodities they have for sale.

Creativity is the ability to produce ideas that are both original and valuable.

The value of an artist is more because of his originality than his skill.

You don't have to reinvent the wheel... just steal the hubcaps._ _ Michael P. Naughton,

Originality of mind untainted,And enthusiasm for life, unlimited.

Yes, be different, but not for the vanities of being different.

Originality has nothing to do with producing something _ new_ - it is about seeking the source, the primordial ground from which you draw and have always drawn your being. It comes about when one works from one__ origins, it is the dance of the eternal return_ and is as ancient as the Dreamtime.

When there is silence, Give your voice. When there is darkness, Shine your light. When there is desperation, Offer hope.