Once a new idea springs into existence, it cannot be unthought. There is a sense of immortality in a new idea.
People with new ideas, people with the faintest capacity for saying something new, are extremely few in number, extraordinarily so, in fact.
There is no such thing as a new idea. We simply take a lot of old ideas and put them into a sort of mental kaleidoscope.
Thus, the task is not so much to see what no one yet has seen, but to think what nobody yet has thought about that which everybody sees.
New ideas come into this world somewhat like falling meteors, with a flash and an explosion.
An original idea. That can't be too hard. The library must be full of them.
Creativity is the process of bringing something new into being.
Creativity is thinking up new things. Innovation is doing new things.
The genius of democracies is seen not only in the great number of new words introduced but even more in the new ideas they express.
Originality is a quality that cannot be imitated. The technique of the language, on the other hand, is something that belongs to all who can understand it.
Originality consists of returning to the origin. Thus, originality means returning, through one's resources, to the simplicity of the early solutions.
Original thinking migrates each day in search of nourishment.
So many new ideas are at first strange and horrible though ultimately valuable that a very heavy responsibility rests upon those who would prevent their dissemination.
Progress in science depends on new techniques, new discoveries and new ideas, probably in that order.
You have to be as original as possible. It's a tough thing to come up with something totally original.
Don't 'write what you know.' Make up something new!
Uncommon things must be said in common words.
It is easy to say something new, if all senses one will eschew. But hardly ever is found, that the new is also sound.
I don't ever want to do anything that's obvious, and I also want to find ways to do things that are extremely new and exciting and can make sense in bizarre ways. I always want things to make sense in really bizarre ways.
Being creative means first of all doing something unusual... On the other hand, however unusual it may be, the idea also has to be reasonable for people to take it seriously.
I'm a more skilled writer now, but after 23 books it's harder to be fresh and that's really important to me. I don't want to write the same thing over and over again.
Some people are aware of another sort of thinking which... leads to those simple ideas that are obvious only after they have been thought of... the term 'lateral thinking' has been coined to describe this orther sort of thinking; 'vertical thinking' is used to denote the conventional logical process.
The world is forever babbling of originality; but there never yet was an original man, in the sense intended by the world; the first man himself--who according to the Rabbins was also the first author--not being an original; the only original author being God.
It has cost me years of thought to arrive at certain results, by many believed to be unattainable, for which there are now numerous claimants, and the number of these is rapidly increasing, like that of the colonels in the South after the war.
I think that genius comes not just from having great mental processing power. It comes from being able to, as Steve Jobs' ad said, think different.
