Creative Appropriation Quotes

If it looks like art, chances are it's somebody else's art.

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

Originality is nothing but judicious imitation. The most original writers borrowed one from another.

Yes, we were amazed when that happened. It was a real joke to us. Konrad Lueg and I did a Happening, and we used the phrase just for the Happening, to have a catchy name for it; and then it immediately got taken up and brought into use. There's no defence against that - and really it's no bad thing.

We all steal, but if we're smart we steal from great directors. Then, we can call it influence.

I see my work plagiarized in gardening programmes and decorating programmes and car adverts, and I suppose I have to accept that's just the way art gets assimilated into culture.

Minor artists borrow, great ones steal.

I don't read much of what I write because I worry about unintentionally borrowing something.

I won't lie, I stole a lot of ideas from Giampaolo.

Writers are the most terrible kleptomaniacs.

When you snatch little pieces of other people's lives and try to palm them off as your own, that's more disgusting than anything. Robin Williams is a huge thief. Denis Leary is a huge thief. His whole stand-up career is based on Bill Hicks, a brilliant guy who died years ago.

To build is to be robbed.

I have an unconscious burglar living in my mind: If I read something, it's mine.

I never admit to wishing I'd written something by another author, but if my name mysteriously appeared on the title page of 'The Guns of August,' I wouldn't complain.

My dad is Scottish, and he read in the newspaper about the plight of the Scottish Freshwater Mussel, which is a real thing - like, a very real, serious conservation issue. And he's a writer, and he was going to do a film about a Glaswegian gangster, and then I stole the idea and turned it into a romantic comedy.

The life and vigor of poetry consists of the fact that it steps out of itself, tears out a section of religion, then withdraws into itself to assimilate it. The same is true of philosophy.

Creation always involves building upon something else. There is no art that doesn't reuse. And there will be less art if every reuse is taxed by the appropriator.

I feel able to steal from Emily Dickinson because she's both wonderful and dead.

Like in comedy, you know the names of the people who steal things that others work really hard on. It really sucks. And, in magic, it's not just the hard work of getting the words and attitude and point of view right; you're taking an actual invention, making something over three or four years, and somebody can just take it.

One of the things that's really the cornerstone of '90s hip-hop is sampling.

'Star Trek' is notorious for looting the more thoughtful work of writers for their striking effects, leaving behind most of the thought and subtlety.

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.

[B]ut in literature, it should be remembered, a thing always becomes his at last who says it best, and thus makes it his own.

In the art world Robert Rauschenberg had been combining common materials that people thought was art and beautiful, and it was. If he could do that, I could emulate him.

I mean they're making remakes of my films and I'm not even dead yet! Why would you want to make a remake?