There's a thin line between genius and insanity - and I always get labelled as being the crazy one.
There's always that argument to make - that you're in better company historically if people don't understand what you're doing.
For years, Ono's work - musical and otherwise - was, in large part, dismissed and derided; at best, it was often misunderstood.
I'd like to write some songs that are so good that nobody understands them. Not even myself.
Genius has oftenest been the pariah of his time, the unhoused god whom none cared for, unnamed till they whom he first promoted, enriched and honored, found it honorable to own their benefactor.
I'm a misunderstood genius.
It isn’t easy being a brilliant inventor, always alone. Always misunderstood. Easy to turn bitter, make horrible mistakes. People are more difficult to work with than machines. And when you break a person, he can’t be fixed. -Hephaestus
The physicists say that I am a mathematician, and the mathematicians say that I am a physicist. I am a completely isolated man and though everybody knows me, there are very few people who really know me.
I walk through the hotel and I walk down the street, and people look at me like I'm [expletive] insane, like I'm Hitler. One day the light will shine through and one day people will understand everything I ever did.
I'm a misunderstood genius." "What's misunderstood?" "Nobody thinks I'm a genius.
I have suffered from being misunderstood, but I would have suffered a hell of a lot more if I had been understood.
When I'm dead and no longer the threat. My comfort is that all the great artists since the beginning of time have always been completely misunderstood and never fully appreciated until they were dead.
I got into an argument with someone because I said I think 2Pac will be regarded as a great poet. They said he was just a punk gangster. People said the same thing about Francois Villon, and he's now considered the best French Romantic poet of all time.
People think it's great to be ahead of your time, but it can actually be quite painful.
Art is something that is so perfectly clear that no one comprehends it.
Kafka is still unrecognized. He thought he was a comic writer.
There are other great writers who are not read properly in their own day for the reason, perhaps, that their readers are not yet born. What they have to say to their own generation is said so at cross-purposes and with such apparent irrelevance that it is not understood. They are, as it were, giants who tower above their own age to cast their shadows across the next.
The swan, like the soul of the poet, By the dull world is ill understood.
I have heard him [William Harvey] say, that after his Booke of the Circulation of the Blood came-out, that he fell mightily in his Practize, and that 'twas beleeved by the vulgar that he was crack-brained.
James Dean was always a tortured soul.
An original mind is rarely understood, until it has been reflected from some half-dozen congenial with it, so averse are men to admitting the true in an unusual form; whilst any novelty, however fantastic, however false, is greedily swallowed.
People think of the inventor as a screwball, but no one ever asks the inventor what he thinks of other people.
They wouldn't listen to the fact that I was genius.
I worked closely with Steve Jobs for twenty-six years. To this day, for all that has been written about him, I don't believe that any of it comes close to capturing the man I knew.
In a stupid nation the man of genius becomes a god : everybody worships him and nobody does his will.
