Birth Quote by Mark Twain

Wherein lies a poet's claim to originality? That he invents his incidents? No. That he was present when his episodes had their birth? No.…

— Edith Wharton

“A genuine poet is one who writes about experiences before they happen to him.”

— T.S Eliot

Every true poet, I thought, must be original and originality a condition of poetic genius; so that each poet is like a species in…

— Gerard Manley Hopkins

“No one has claim to originality in literature; all writers are more or less faithful amanuenses of the spirit, translators and annotators of pre-existing…

— James E. Irby

“A poet is the most unpoetical of anything in existence because he has no identity-he is continually infirming and filling some other body.”

— John Keats

“Originality is a myth perpetuated by the naive, the romantic, and the unscrupulous.”

— Tom Robbins

What the poet says has never been said before, but, once he has said it, his readers recognize its validity for themselves.

— W. H. Auden

Poetry is a counterfeit creation, and makes things that are not, as though they were

— John Donne

Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth…

— C. S. Lewis

Each truth that a writer acquires is a lantern, which he turns full on what facts and thoughts lay already in his mind, and…

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

“The merit of originality is not novelty, it is sincerity. The believing man is the original man.”

— Thomas Carlyle

Perhaps no poet is a conscious plagiarist, but there seems to be warrant for suspecting that there is no poet who is not at…

— Mark Twain