Albert Camus Quotes

All great deeds and all great thoughts have a ridiculous beginning. Great works are often born on a street corner or in a restaurant's revolving door.

It is better to fail in originality, than to succeed in imitation. He who has never failed somewhere, that man can not be great. Failure is the true test of greatness.

No one was ever great without some portion of divine inspiration.

The world doesn't need any more mediocrity or hedged bets.

But the fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright Brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.

It is only the great men who are truly obscene. If they had not dared to be obscene, they could never have dared to be great.

An essential aspect of creativity is not being afraid to fail

Give the composer time to experiment, time to try out ideas. Also, the time to fail. When the composer has very little time, the temptation is to reach for stock ideas - ideas they know will work and have worked in the past.

If you truly want to be great, don't get caught up in what has been done before or who has done it.

It's hard to make something that's interesting. It's really, really hard. It's like a law of nature, a law of aerodynamics, that anything that's written or anything that's created wants to be mediocre. The natural state of all writing is mediocrity... So what it takes to make anything more than mediocre is such an act of will.

The Great don't innovate, they fertilize seeds planted by lackeys, they leave to others the inhaling of the flowers whose roots they've manured. A deceptive memory may be the key to their originality.

Dare to be wrong and to dream.

Our best work can't possibly appeal to the average masses, only our average work can. Finding the humility to happily walk away from those that don't get it unlocks our ability to do great work.

Inspiration is the opportunity of genius.

The creator gives no heed to the critic unless he becomes a barren inventor.

We suffered failures of imagination just like everyone else, our daring was wanting, and our daily contentment too nearly adequate for us to give it up.

You always want to try and evolve an art form. It's not a very humble ambition; it reeks of arrogance. If you can, you want to try to do something that people haven't done before and give people something that they haven't seen.

My feeling is that as far as creativity is concerned, isolation is required. Creation is embarrassing. For every new good idea you have, there are a hundred, ten thousand foolish ones.

The imitator dooms himself to hopeless mediocrity.

When young comedians ask me for advice that's the one thing I always say is if they're improvisers I'm like do improv, don't make that your sole thing. And at the end of the day when you do your best work you also just kinda, by definition flush it down the toilet and never do it again.

The artist is always beginning. Any work of art which is not a beginning, an invention, a discovery is of little worth.

I tell the actors that the biggest gift they can give me is to fail. And that the second gift they can give me is to surprise me.

A great man will find a great subject, or which is the same thing, make any subject great.

A writer who is afraid to overreach himself is as useless as a general who is afraid to be wrong.