A Quote by Keith Johnstone
Truth is that the best ideas are often psychotic, obscene and unoriginal.
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At school any spontaneous act was likely to get me into trouble. I learned never to act on impulse, and that whatever came into my mind first should be rejected in favour of better ideas. I learned that my imagination Wasn’t ‘good’ enough. I learned that the first idea was unsatisfactory because it was (1) psychotic; (2) obscene; (3) unoriginal. The truth is that the best ideas are often psychotic, obscene and unoriginal.
Writing your own story around the same ideas is not plagiarism; at worst, it's being unoriginal.
In representing criminal defendants - especially guilty ones - it is often necessary to take the offensive against the government: to put the government on trial for its misconduct. In law, as in sports, the best defense is often a good offense. The courtroom oath - to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth - is applicable only to witnesses... because the American justice system is built on a foundation of not telling the whole entire truth.
It's very easy to overproduce stuff and you can forget those first spontaneous ideas are often the best ideas.
Actors are loved because they are unoriginal. Actors stick to their script. The unoriginal man is loved by the mediocrity because this kind of artistic expression is something to which the merest five-eighth can climb.
The best ideas and the most useful and ground-breaking are often, though not always, in one sense, very simple ideas.
The best ideas often look terrible at the beginning the truly good ideas, don't seem like they're worth stealing.
A good way to have good ideas is by being unoriginal.
The obscene and vulgar stories in the Bible are as repugnant to our ideas of the purity of a Divine Being, as the horrid cruelties and murders it ascribes to Him are repugnant to our ideas of His justice.
Truth has power. And if we all gravitate toward similar ideas, maybe we do so because those ideas are true...written deep within us. And when we hear the truth, even if we don't understand it, we feel that truth resonate within us...vibrating with our unconscious wisdom. Perhaps the truth is not learned by us, but rather, the truth is re-called...re-membered...-re-cognized...as that which is already inside us.
As psychotic as it gets outside, the comic can be more psychotic.
The truth of the matter is, beauty is a specific thing, rare and fleeting. Some of us have it in our teens, 20s and 30s and then lose it; most of us have it not at all. And that's perfectly okay. But lying to yourself that you have it when you don't seems to me simple-minded at best and psychotic at worst.
Look, I promise I’m not psychotic. Eccentric and idiosyncratic, but not psychotic. (Sebastian) I’ll bet the prisons are full of men who have told women that. (Channon)
True ideas are those that we can assimilate, validate, corroborate, and verify. False ideas are those that we cannot. That is the practical difference it makes to us to have true ideas; that therefore is the meaning of truth, for it is all that truth is known as.
I imagine like most of us that I'd like obscene amounts of money but the people I met and worked with who have those obscene amounts of money and have obscene amounts of fame have awful lives. Really. I mean hideously compromised lives.
I imagine like most of us that I'd like obscene amounts of money but the people I met and worked with who have those obscene amounts of money and have obscene amounts of fame have awful lives. Really. I mean hideously compromised lives. And I can go anywhere. No one knows who I am.
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