originality
Who owns the words? Who owns the music and the rest of our culture? We do—all of us—though not all of us know it yet. Reality cannot be copyrighted.
Reality Hunger: A Manifesto (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010), 209.
Every book is a quotation; and every house is a quotation out of all forests and mines and stone quarries; and every man is a quotation from all his ancestors.
The originality which we ask from the artist is originality of treatment, not of subject. It is only the unimaginative who ever invent. The true artist is known by the use he makes of what he annexes, and he annexes everything.
Quoted in Oscar Wilde: The Critic as Humanist, by Bruce Bashford (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1999), 116.
Everyone complains that it has all been done before, but we haven’t even begun. There’s an incredible amount of new tricks up good people’s sleeves.
Interview by Moira Cullen, Eye magazine, Spring 2006. Link here.
Ideas, in a sense, are overrated. Of course, you need good ones, but at this point in our supersaturated culture, precious few are so novel that nobody else has ever thought of them before. It’s really about where you take the idea, and how committed you are to solving the endless problems that come up in the execution.
“Be Wrong as Fast as You Can,” New York Times Magazine, January 4, 2013.
Originally, feathers evolved to retain heat; later, they were repurposed for a means of flight. No one ever accuses the descendants of ancient birds of plagiarism for taking heat-retaining feathers and modifying them into wings for flight. In our current system, the original feathers would be copyrighted, and upstart birds would get sued for stealing the feathers for a different use. Almost all famous discoveries (by Edison, Darwin, Einstein, et al.) were not lightning-bolt epiphanies but were built slowly over time and heavily dependent on the intellectual superstructure of what had come before them. The commonplace book was popular among English intellectuals in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. These notebooks were a depository for thoughts and quotes and were usually categorized by topic. Enquire Within Upon Everything was a commercially successful take-off on the commonplace book in London in 1890. There’s no such thing as originality. Invention and innovation grow out of rich networks of people and ideas. All life on earth (and by extension, technology) is built upon appropriation and reuse of the preexisting.
David Shields, “Life Is Short; Art is Shorter, The Los Angeles Review of Books, May 2, 2011.
I think I get so in love with a band that I just end up pretty much copying them. And I hope that the originality can come from the fact that you’re in love with 1,000 bands and they’re all completely different. So that when you copy all of them at once, that’s how you create something new.
“Bombay Bicycle Club: From Many Sounds, One Band,” NPR, January 14, 2012.
Originality is only variation.
Platitudes in the Making: Precepts & Advices for Gentlefolk (London: D. J. Rider, 1911), 14.
All of us have a personal sound that’s coming from our limitations. What makes a sound unique is the inability to do what we’re trying to do. You know that thing about Miles Davis: when he was young and trying to play like Dizzy Gillespie, he said he couldn’t play that high or that fast. If he could have just played like Dizzy Gillespie, then there wouldn’t be any Miles Davis.
Marc Ribot interview with Bill Frisell, BOMB magazine, Issue 79, Spring 2002.
Quotation is something that happens a lot in the music world. Merle Haggard can mimic Johnny Cash and Willie Nelson perfectly. The Beatles, in “Back in the USSR,” mimic The Beach Boys. Quotation is a phrase that is used all the time in jazz solos. It happens a lot in old-time string band music too. One song is always using a line from another song to brace it. But then goes off on another tangent. Minstrels did it all the time. Weird takes on Shakespeare plays, stuff like that. It’s just done automatically.
“Bob Dylan in Conversation with John Elderfield,” Spring 2011.
Next to the originator of a good sentence is the first quoter of it. Many will read the book before one thinks of quoting a passage. As soon as he has done this, that line will be quoted east and west.
“Quotation and Originality,” in Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Vol. 4 (Boston: Houghton, Osgood & Company, 1880), 154.
If you think you know what plagiarism is, you are making a very large claim—the claim that you know originality when you see it.
“Steal This Article,” Vanity Fair, May 1996.