Richard Hofstadter Quotes

If you're ahead of your time, who's going to listen? If you're behind the times, it's boring.

The tradition of the new. Yesterday's avant-gard-experiment is today's chic and tomorrow's cliche.

There's a fine line between what would characterize you as a troglodyte and what would characterize you as a brilliant, avant-garde, forward-thinking genius. There's some middle ground.

Originality is the one thing which unoriginal minds cannot feel the use of.

I should probably confess that I get bored easily, which explains my reluctance to work with formula, tropes, whatever.

It is not necessary to be too avant-garde, because you risk not being understood.

I don't find myself so exercised by a desperation to be new.

In a country as united as ours [Russia], it is quite inevitable that a certain amount of thinking in clichés should appear, and I want to overcome this standardized way of thinking and introduce into our literature new ideas, new feeling and rhythms.

When you are known as this cutting-edge composer all the time... it's no longer cutting-edge.

I don't like the idea of seeing a movie and it feels comfortable because you've heard it before.

I hate good taste. It's the worst thing that can happen to a creative person.

All great ideas start as weird ideas. What now seems obvious, early on, is not obvious to anybody.

What the world calls originality is only an unaccustomed method of tickling it.

If everyone thinks you have a good idea, you´re too late

If you do something that's really original, you discover why everybody else does it the other way, usually. There's a reason cliches exist, 'cause they work.

Lack of originality, everywhere, all over the world, from time immemorial, has always been considered the foremost quality and the recommendation of the active, efficient and practical man.

I always want to do something groundbreaking, something different. I think that's what it's always about. If you have the means to do it, why not?

How boring to copy the past -- with all the magnificence of today and tomorrow.

Yesterday's dangerous idea is today's orthodoxy and tomorrow's cliché.

All art is based on non-conformity.

Through care taken over trends, the desire to be novel and affectation knowledge, we repudiate our art, our instinct, our own way of doing things; it is absurd and stupid

New ways I go, a new speech comes to me; weary I grow, like all creators, of the old tongues. My spirit no longer wants to walk on worn soles.

If you wish to obtain a great name or to found an establishment, be completely mad; but be sure that your madness corresponds with the turn and temper of your age.

When you make something that everyone likes, it's very easy to say, "Well, I'll just repeat that." Because that was easy. I have a formula. But creatively, it's not very interesting.

Don’t repeat yourself. It’s not only repetitive, it’s redundant, and people have heard it before.