Art & Creativity Quote by C. S. Lewis

Originality, Lewis suggests, is what happens when you stop chasing it like a prize and start treating it as a side-effect. The line is a neat piece of rhetorical judo: it takes the era's sacred cow (the artist as singular genius) and flips it, arguing that the obsessive hunt for newness produces work that smells of effort, fashion, and self-conscious performance. What reads as a moral instruction is also a craft note: attention is finite, and if you spend it policing whether your idea has been said before, you're no longer looking hard enough at the thing itself.

Lewis is writing against the modernist and post-Romantic pressure to be unprecedented. Mid-century literature had inherited a cultural marketplace where novelty sells and influence can look like failure. His blunt little phrase "twopence" punctures that whole anxiety with pocket change. It frames originality not as a heroic act but as a minor, almost silly obsession - a cheap worry that distracts from the expensive task of seeing clearly.

The subtext is theological and ethical without being preachy: "tell the truth" isn't just about factual accuracy; it's about fidelity to reality as you perceive it, with humility about your place in a long conversation. That humility is the paradox engine here. When you stop trying to sound unlike everyone else, you stop imitating the pose of originality. You end up sounding like yourself, which is the only kind of "new" anyone can reliably produce.