James Fenton Quotes

I'd rather do my own performance than copy someone else's.

I don't think anybody came into the movie business to be unoriginal and plagiarising and not having an original idea in their brain.

We call ourselves creators and we just copy.

To copy others is necessary, but to copy oneself is pathetic.

The difference between a bad artist and a good one is: the bad artist seems to copy a great deal; the good one really does.

Good artists copy, great artists steal.

Art is either plagiarism or revolution.

I got everything from someone. Nobody can be original.

Originality is the art of concealing your source.

Originality is the fine art of remembering what you hear but forgetting where you heard it.

What is originality? Undetected plagiarism.

About the most originality that any writer can hope to achieve honestly is to steal with good judgment.

I don't want nobody to ever say, 'I coulda done that beat' or 'I know where you got that from.'

Art is either revolution or plagiarism

It's hard work to find your own voice and not to copycat anything.

You can't copy anybody and end with anything. If you copy, it means you're working without any real feeling.

When a writer tries to copy another writer, it's doomed to fail.

Imitation is the highest form of flattery, but clones kind of get it wrong because we are promoting individuality and being proud of being yourself.

Posterity weaves no garlands for imitators.

Originality is undetected plagiarism.

Lesser artists borrow, great artists steal.

To form our taste, we must neither depreciate nor imitate, but we should understand and originate.

Being a cover artist is not like being a real artist. That's just copying what someone else did.

I think all comics borrow from each other. Only a few have an original voice, and I wasn't one of them. In the end, I couldn't figure out who to steal from, so I stopped doing it.

We can use techniques in modifying things, in controlling things, but the first impulse has to be something that you simply cannot make just out of technique, or else it becomes perfectly evident that it is nothing but technique that you're exercising.