Originality usually amounts only to plagiarizing something unfamiliar.
Katharine Fullerton Gerould

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

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

Thank goodness I was never sent to school; it would have rubbed off some of the originality.
Beatrix Potter

The British feel of blues has been hard, rather than emotional. Far too much emphasis on 12 bar, too little attention to words, far too little originality.
Alexis Korner

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

The greater intellect one has, the more originality one finds in men. Ordinary persons find no difference between men.
Blaise Pascal

The merit of originality is not novelty; it is sincerity.
Thomas Carlyle

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

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

The secret of all effective originality in advertising is not the creation of new and tricky words and pictures, but one of putting familiar words and pictures into new relationships.
Leo Burnett

The world in general doesn't know what to make of originality; it is startled out of its comfortable habits of thought, and its first reaction is one of anger.
W. Somerset Maugham

The writer of originality, unless dead, is always shocking, scandalous; novelty disturbs and repels.
Simone de Beauvoir

True originality consists not in a new manner but in a new vision.
Edith Wharton

We shall be forced to attempt planned and directed research employing hundreds of workers for many years, and this cannot be done without risking the loss of independence and originality. This is a serious and fundamental obstacle but it may be overcome in two ways.
John Desmond Bernal

What is originality? Undetected plagiarism.
Dean Inge

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

When I was coming up, we weren't trying to get a hit or get paid, we were just trying to do our thing. The only thing we were really trying to do was to be recognized for our originality.
Bootsy Collins