"L'écrivain original n'est pas celui qui n'imite personne, mais celui que personne ne peut imiter."
— Writing

January 1, 1970

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Added on April 10, 2026
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OccupationsArtLiteratureWriting
Original Language: English

Sources

François-René de Chateaubriand, Le génie du Christianisme (The Genius of Christianity) (1802). This sentence has also been translated as: "The original style is not the style which never borrows of any one, but that which no other person is capable of reproducing" in Respectfully Quoted: A Dictionary of Quotations (1989), reporting translation by Charles I. White (1856, reprinted 1976), part 2, book 1, chapter 3, p. 221; and as "The original writer is not he who refrains from imitating others, b