Creative Borrowing Quotes

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

In many senses, creativity and 'plagiarism' are nearly indivisible.

Theatre artists are essentially sort of charlatans and thieves, I mean that's the tradition that we come from, so I have absolutely no, I make no bones about the fact that I steal from here and I take from there, and we all do it, that's perfectly all right, that's the nothing, there's nothing new in the world, there's nothing actually new in the way that you do something, but the point is is how do you take something and use it to articulate what is essentially a core of any given theatrical production.

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

I steal from every movie ever made.

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

If you go back and watch 'The French Connection,' it's been cannibalized so many times. There are certain movies like that, where you see the original and think, 'This isn't so great.' And the reason it isn't so great is because everyone has copied it.

I'm trying to figure out what I can do creatively. It's about trying to find new things and trying to figure out voices and borrowing from things and learning as much as possible so that I have an archive of things to borrow from.

In a very ugly and sensible age, the arts borrow, not from life, but from each other.

Nothing is sillier than this charge of plagiarism. There is no sixth commandment in art. The poet dare help himself wherever he lists, wherever he finds material suited to his work. He may even appropriate entire columns with their carved capitals, if the temple he thus supports be a beautiful one. Goethe understood this very well, and so did Shakespeare before him.

There's so many great coming-of-age movies to steal from, and I feel like I just tried to steal from them all equally.

In the arts they call it plagiarism, in business they call it competition.

As a kid, I was obsessed with 'Calvin and Hobbes' and 'Bone,' and I'm certain that I've unconsciously ripped off ideas from both, wholesale.

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.

Ideas improve. The meaning of words participates in the improvement. Plagiarism is necessary. Progress implies it. It embraces an author's phrase, makes use of his expressions, erases a false idea, and replaces it with the right idea.

The only art I'll ever study is stuff I can steal from.

The relation between life and literature - a final antimony - is one of mutual plagiarism.

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

Subtract from many modern poets all that may be found in Shakespeare, and trash will remain.

Perhaps no poet is a conscious plagiarist, but there seems to be warrant for suspecting that there is no poet who is not at one time or another an unconscious one.

Poetry can only be made out of other poems; novels out of other novels.

The ancients stole all our ideas from us.

If you think a man draws the type of hands that you want to draw, steal ‘em. Take those hands.

I believe in the discipline of mastering the best that other people have ever figured out. I don't believe in just sitting down and trying to dream it all up yourself. Nobody's that smart.

I have an unconscious burglar living in my mind: If I read something, it's mine. I can read Middle English stories, Geoffrey Chaucer or Sir Thomas Malory, but once I start moving in the direction of contemporary fantasy, my mind begins to take over.