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by Samuel_Michon
4739 days ago
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“Pablo Picasso said the famous words: "Good artists copy, great artists steal". But you shouldn't take that all too literally though. Inspiration is one thing - it happens all the time, especially in the design world. But there is a very obvious line between copying and inspiration.” Actually, it was Steve Jobs who said that. Jobs attributed it to Picasso, but there’s no record of Picasso saying anything of the sort. T.S. Eliot did write something like it: “One of the surest tests [of the superiority or inferiority of a poet] is the way in which a poet borrows. Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different than that from which it is torn; the bad poet throws it into something which has no cohesion. A good poet will usually borrow from authors remote in time, or alien in language, or diverse in interest.” That quote was subsequently used in a biography of Picasso by John Richardson. That's probably how Jobs came to remember it as a quote by Picasso. http://nancyprager.wordpress.com/2007/05/08/good-poets-borro... |
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tl;dr:
In conclusion, in 1892 an important precursor of this family of expressions was published. The author was W. H. Davenport Adams, and his words may have influenced the version that T. H. Eliot published in 1920.