George Balanchine Quotes

Someone very smart once said to me, "Steal, don't borrow." So if there's anything good in anything anyone else does, it's fair game. I think that everything I've ever done at some point is part of someone else's legacy.

Most of us don't invent ideas. We take the best ideas from someone else.

I do tend to take lines from other lines I like, and then write around them.

Artists everywhere steal mercilessly all the time and I think this is healthy.

Picasso had a saying - 'good artists copy, great artists steal' - and we have always been shameless about stealing great ideas.

Some of us have great original ideas and some of us depend on adaptations.

You'd have to be completely crazy not to be influenced by and take from other artists. It's completely impossible not to.

Lesser artists borrow, great artists steal.

I take stuff because I'm inspired by it.

Sometimes, as a comedian, a line will come to you, that is so beautiful, so perfect, that you think: I did not create this line. This line belongs to all of us. Surely this is a line of God.

What I've learned is that it's okay to take from heroes, such as Debussy, but it has to be filtered through my own personality so that ultimately it's me.

I don't think I really invented anybody. I have drawn on real life.

That is why the analogy of stealing does not work. With a thief, we want to know how much money he stole, and from whom. With the artist it is not how much he took and from whom, but what he did with it.

You cannot possibly invent painting all by yourself.

We Americans love original ideas. But truly, there are already plenty of good ones out there, ours for the taking. If I were too proud to copy the ideas of others, I likely wouldn't have even a fraction of my current success.

The music is a personal expression, like art. It is something that you like doing that comes from within, and is an expression that comes from God. That is why artists are beautiful and why people who copy are not really artistic.

All writers are magpies, right? We're always stealing bits from different places and then weaving them into our little nest.

The imagination imitates. It is the critical spirit that creates.

All writers steal. You might as well steal from the best.

If you look at any creative person's work, you can see bits and pieces of their influences. That's what an artist does.

When I take from my influences, it's rare that I do it literally.

All art is theft.

I steal from every single movie ever made. I love it - if my work has anything it's that I'm taking this from this and that from that and mixing them together. If people don't like that, then tough titty, don't go and see it, all right? I steal from everything. Great artists steal; they don't do homages.

One musician listens to another musician, and you get inspired and then you do your thing, but it's yours.

Ultimately, it comes down to taste. It comes down to trying to expose yourself to the best things that humans have done and then try to bring those things into what you're doing. Picasso had a saying: good artists copy, great artists steal. And we have always been shameless about stealing great ideas, and I think part of what made the Macintosh great was that the people working on it were musicians and poets and artists and zoologists and historians who also happened to be the best computer scientists in the world.