Katharine Elizabeth Fullerton Gerould Quotes

Since when was genius found respectable?

Society will pardon much to genius and special gifts; but, being in its nature conventional, it loves what is conventional, or what belongs to coming together.

In order to deviate successfully, one has to have at least a passing acquaintance with whatever norm one expects to deviate from.

We allow no geniuses around our Studio.

If you read all the time what other people have done, you will the think the way they thought.

One of the strongest characteristics of genius is the power of lighting its own fire.

Rules and models destroy genius and art.

What is genius but the power of expressing a new individuality?

Judge the goodness of a book by the energy of the punches it has given you. I believe the greatest characteristic of genius, is, above all, force.

No one can be profoundly original who does not avoid eccentricity.

If you're always thinking about someone else's work, about the tradition you're working in, how can you possibly make anything good?

The American people ... have a stake in con-conformity, for they know that the American genius is non-conformist.

Where a bad custom has been in existence for any length of time, most people grow to regard it as part of the order of nature.

It's no longer possible to find something which will shock other people, because everything has already been done.

The world thinks eccentricity in great things is genius, but in small things, only crazy.

Every age might perhaps produce one or two geniuses, if they were not sunk under the censure and obloquy of plodding, servile, imitating pedants.

The empire of custom is most mighty.

Society will be obeyed; if you refuse obedience, you must take the consequences. Society has only one law, and that is custom. Even religion itself is socially powerful only just so far as it has custom on its side.

In this great society wide lying around us, a critical analysis would find very few spontaneous actions. It is almost all custom and gross sense.

Genius is what makes us forget the master's talent.

We have more faith in what we imitate than in what we create

... the genius never makes anything new, but always something that is just different, and the average talents provide him the possibility within which his genius condenses into achievements.

It should be possible to say that there really is such as thing as "genius" and that what it is, is precisely a surprising and unexpected movement away from collective patterns of behavior and received wisdom.

Everything had been done long before I started making movies. I mean, there's nothing that Godard hasn't already done. You can't do a single thing that Godard hasn't already thought of. And so you struggle to do something that is not predictable.

The most attractive class of people are those who are powerful obliquely, and not by the direct stroke: men of genius, but not yetaccredited: one gets the cheer of their light, without paying too great a tax.