Elias Canetti Quotes

When I was going through those very fast changes, I think it was terribly important to me that I was seen to be inventive. I think that was the characteristic of my work that I wanted people to see.

I think we're giving people something new that people didn't know was out there before.

If they haven't heard it before it's original.

Artists are always looking for new things and fresh ground and fresh air. If it feels new to me, there's a chance it'll feel new to the audience and we'll have found something.

I think it is more important to tell a story rather than follow any trend; that is a less bold way to go. If you do that [follow trends] you are just trying to ride on the coat tails of someone else's success.

Creativity is as important as literacy.

Originality is only variation.

I think it's important to always offer something new.

To the extent a person makes, invents or thinks something that is new to him, he may be said to have performed a creative act.

An idea you have might not be original. But by creating a novel out of that idea you can make it original.

Creativity is the defeat of habit by originality.

Utter originality is, of course, out of the question.

Originality is also very important to a writer. And all of the writers I've mentioned, of course, are original, but it's important to me that every book that I do be really a completely fresh and new look at the world. And of course, that makes it frightening to start a new book because you can't really depend upon what you've done with previous books.

I'm not original, but I strive toward it as much as possible. I tried really hard on Weekend Update to do something that I considered original, which was, I tried to cut all cleverness out of the joke.

No Ideas original - there is nothing new under the sun.

What people have to make sure of is that they're not replicating something that already exists. You really have to ask yourself: "Is there a point in me doing this? Has this already been said before? Is this moving things along or is this just adding to the giant pile of junk that's already there?"

I realized that we're now at a point of self-reference with the Internet culture that there's almost no there left, you know? It's important to make new things. It's important to make culture, rather than simply reference it. I love a good cultural reference, and it's one of the great joys in my life, but it has to all be in balance with the core job, which is to make something new. And that sort of brings me around to why I started talking about my fondness for marijuana.

Eventually you'll take the phrases and rhythm patterns you've copped and begin to put your own mark on them

While photography is the easiest medium in which to be competent, it is the hardest in which to develop an idiosyncratic personal vision.

Creativity does not derive from order but from the attempt to impose order where it does not exist, to make new connections.

You make something. You give up expressing and start inventing.

Genius is play, and man's capacity for achieving genius is infinite, and many may achieve genius only through play.

No idea is original, there's nothing new under the sun, it's never what you do, but how it's done

It is the fate of every great achievement to be pounced upon by pedants and imitators who drain it of life and turn it into an orthodoxy which stifles all stirrings of originality.