"There is no such thing as a..." - Quote by Mark Twain
There is no such thing as a new idea. It is impossible. We simply take a lot of old ideas and put them into a sort of mental kaleidoscope. We give them a turn and they make new and curious combinations. We keep on turning and making new combinations indefinitely; but they are the same old pieces of colored glass that have been in use through all the ages.
More by Mark Twain
“Only kings, presidents, editors, and people with tapeworms have the right to use the editorial 'we.'”
“Let your secret sympathies and your compassion be always with the under dog in the fight -- this is magnanimity; but bet on the other one -- this is business.”
“In all my travels the thing that has impressed me the most is the universal brotherhood of man-what there is of it.”
More on Ideas
“When I am grown up I shall carry a notebook—a fat book with many pages, methodically lettered. I shall enter my phrases.”
“The actual life of a thought lasts only until it reaches the point of speech...As soon as our thinking has found words it ceases to be sincere...When it begins to exist in others it ceases to live in us, just as the child severs itself from its mother when it enters into its own existence.”
“It's not hard to get the ideas when they come. They just come... it's painful waiting for them.”
More on Creativity
“Each mind has its own method.”
“What are the hallmarks of a competent writer of fiction? The first, it seems to me, is that he should be immensely interested in human beings, and have an eye sharp enough to see into them, and a hand clever enough to draw them as they are. The second is that he should be able to set them in imaginary situations which display the contents of their psyches effectively, and so carry his reader swiftly and pleasantly from point to point of what is called a good story.”
“I cannot easily buy a blank-book to write thoughts in; they are commonly ruled for dollars and cents.”