Syd Barrett Quotes

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

I'm a writer who likes to be influenced.

God creates, I do not create. I assemble and I steal everywhere to do it - from what I see, from what the dancers can do, from what others do.

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

Great literature must spring from an upheaval in the author's soul. If that upheaval is not present then it must come from the works of any other author which happens to be handy and easily adapted.

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

The poet is he who inspires, rather than he who is inspired.

I hardly remember how I started to write poetry. It's hard to imagine what I thought poetry could do.

I sometimes talk about the making of a poem within the poem.

The songs sort of come out spontaneously and it'll take me awhile to figure out what exactly is happening lyrically, what kind of story I'm telling. Then I start building little bridges - word bridges - to make everything go from one point to the next point to the next point until it reaches the end.

Stanley Kubrick was a big inspiration. People accuse me of never using my own material. But when did Kubrick? You look at his films and they are completely unique... completely separate entities.

I don't really care who gets their inspiration from where, it's the end results that count.

So the best way to understand poetry, which is made by men, is to imitate, and that goes back to making work as a kind of doorway into new work, as opposed to making work as a mirror of the old work.

A writer is an artist. They're creating things out of thin air.

For me, the source material can come from anywhere. It can be a poem, it can be a dream, it can be a movie, as long as the end part of it is interesting - that's what it's about for me.

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.

If an artist may say nothing except what he has invented by his own sole efforts, it stands to reason he will be poor in ideas. If he could take what he wants wherever he could find it, as Euripides and Dante and Michelangelo and Shakespeare and Bach were free, his larder would always be full, and his cookery might be worth tasting.

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.

I have stolen ideas from every book I have ever read.

If you're a good composer, you steal good steals.

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.

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

I never think about poetry except when I'm writing it. I mean my poetry.

I take stuff because I'm inspired by it.

I love the feeling of creating pictures in someone's mind just by spelling out the right lyrical combination.