William Wordsworth Quotes

A great deal of phenomenal experience has fostered in me a flexibility of the mind and imagination that some might call madness

The more intelligent a man is, the more originality he discovers in others.

Make visible what, without you, might perhaps never have been seen.

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

Genius makes its observations in short-hand; talent writes them out at length.

Mediocrity can talk, but it is for genius to observe.

I'm not such a fan of imagination. If you're alive to details, they oftentimes suggest a richer or deeper imaginative line than you would have imagined.

I see things with my own eyes, just as if they were the first eyes that ever saw, and then I set about to tell, as best I can, just what I've seen.

Direct experience is the evasion, or hiding place of those devoid of imagination.

I think my thing is that I try and pick up on things that other people have maybe not picked up on.

See what no one else sees. See what everyone chooses not to see... out of fear, conformity or laziness. See the whole world anew each day!

What is originality? To see something that has no name as yet and hence cannot be mentioned although it stares us all in the face. The way men usually are, it takes a name to make something visible for them.

It doesn't really matter who said it - it's so obviously true. Before you can write anything, you have to notice something.

The true creator may be recognized by his ability always to find about him, in the commonest and humblest thing, items worthy of note.

Be the first to see what you see as you see it.

This is the test and triumph of originality, not to show us what has never been, and what we may therefore very easily never have dreamt of, but to point out to us what is before our eyes and under our feet, though we have had no suspicion of its existence, for want of sufficient strength of intuition, of determined grasp of mind to seize and retain it.

You have to be able to observe life as if you were a camera all the time, constantly looking at light and the way that things are placed and the way people hold themselves. You need the ability to see something in someone or something that no one else really sees and be able to bring that to light. Basically, you have to be an obsessive crazy person.

There is no need to create. Genius comes only to those who know how to use their eyes and their intelligence.

Genius is only a superior power of seeing.

True originality consists not in a new manner but in a new vision. That new, that personal, vision is attained only by looking long enough at the object represented to make it the writer's own; and the mind which would bring this secret gem to fruition must be able to nourish it with an accumulated wealth of knowledge and experience.

I think the artistry is in having an insight into what one sees around them. Generally putting things together in a way no one else has before and finding a way to express that to other people who don't have that insight.

Madness is like intelligence, you know. You can't explain it. Just like intelligence. It comes on you, it fills you, and then you understand it. But when it goes away you can't understand it at all any longer.

There's always something new by looking at the same thing over and over.

Writers, some of us, may tend to see things before other people do, things that are right there but aren't noticed in the way that a writer might notice.

He saw things in a way that others did not, so that a city I had lived in all my life seemed a different place, so that a woman became beautiful with the light on her face.