Originality is undetected plagiarism

• Plagiarism is basic to all culture. Pete Seeger
• What is originality? Undetected plagiarism. William Ralph Inge
• Plagiarize! Let no one else’s work evade your eyes, Remember why the good Lord made your eyes. Tom Lehrer
• Nothing of me is original. I am the combined effort of everyone I’ve ever known. Chuck Palahniuk
• But if you rip off a hundred people, everyone will say you’re so original! Gary Panter
• During the course of this long volume I have undoubtedly plagiarized from many sources–to use the ugly term that did not bother Shakespeare’s age. I doubt whether any criticism or cultural history has ever been written without such plagiary, which inevitably results from assimilating the contributions of your countless fellow-workers, past and present. The true function of scholarship as a society is not to stake out claims on which others must not trespass, but to provide a community of knowledge in which others may share. Matt Thomas

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Great artists steal

• Art is theft. Pablo Picasso
• Bad artists copy, good artists steal. Pablo Picasso
• Lesser artists borrow, great artists steal. Igor Stravinsky
• The only art I’ll ever study is stuff I can steal from. David Bowie
• If you think a man draws the type of hands that you want to draw, steal ‘em. Take those hands. Jack Kirby
• Modern art = I could do that + Yeah, but you didn’t. Craig Damrauer
• The only art I’ll ever study is stuff I can steal from. David Bowie
• Artists everywhere steal mercilessly all the time and I think this is healthy. Peter Gabriel
• An original artist is unable to copy. So he has only to copy in order to be original. Jean Cocteau
• The only principle in art is to copy what you see. Dealers in aesthetics to the contrary, every other method is fatal. Auguste Rodin
• Picasso had a saying – ‘good artists copy, great artists steal’ – and we have always been shameless about stealing great ideas. Walter Isaacson
• What a good artist understands is that nothing comes from nowhere. All creative work builds on what came before. Nothing is completely original. Austin Kleon
• Most artists are brought to their vocation when their own nascent gifts are awakened by the work of a master. That is to say, most artists are converted to art by art itself. Finding one’s voice isn’t just an emptying and purifying oneself of the words of others but an adopting and embracing of filiations, communities, and discourses. Inspiration could be called inhaling the memory of an act never experienced. Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void but out of chaos. Lewis Hyde
• I’m being given a little bit of credit now as being a viable collage artist, which some people think is ridiculous. Like this guy who said, “Wait a minute: You had an art show where you just cut out pictures and then glued them back together?” And I said, “Yeah, that’s pretty much what it is.” There’s more to it than that. It’s about having the eye for detail, moving things from one environment and reassembling them into new environments….Everyone can do it, but not everyone can do it well. Robert Pollard
• 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. Quentin Tarantino

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Great poets steal

• A good poet will usually borrow from authors remote in time, or alien in language, or diverse in interest.  T.S. Eliot
• 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. S. Eliot

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Great writers steal

• Books serve to show a man that those original thoughts of his aren’t very new at all. Abraham Lincoln
• All writing is in fact cut-ups. A collage of words read heard overheard. What else? William S. Burroughs
• Writers are like vacuum cleaners, sucking up all that we can see and hear and read and think and feel and articulate, and everything that everyone else within earshot can hear and see and think and feel. Anne Lamott
• The choices a writer makes within a tradition – preferring Milton to Moliere, caring for Barth over Barthelme – constitute some of the most personal information we can have about him. Zadie Smith

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Steal widely

• If you copy from one author, it’s plagiarism. If you copy from many, it’s research. Wilson Mizner
• I’ve always stolen from the people I admire – not plagiarized, mind you, but stolen bits of ideas and stylistic influences. If you steal widely enough, after all, your models are inevitably changed and the result is in the end completely yours. Kleon cites André Gide to this point, in a quotation I love: “Everything that needs to be said has already been said. But, since no one was listening, everything must be said again. Austin Kleon
• You know how you scratch away at a lottery ticket to see if you’ve won? That’s what I’m doing when I begin a piece. I’m digging through everything to find something. […] Scratching can look like borrowing or appropriating, but it’s an essential part of creativity. It’s primal, and very private. It’s a way of saying to the gods, ‘Oh, don’t mind me, I’ll just wander around in these back hallways…’ and then grabbing that piece of fire and running like hell. Twyla Tharp
• Basically the message is: Steal It! Art, music, culture, the odd book and the slab of cheese… the new will be built upon the ruins of the old. Buenaventura Durruti

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Steal what resonates with you

• Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. Jim Jarmusch
• Rip something off that you love….Find something that speaks to you…and build it yourself. Jim Coudal
• Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. Devour old films, new films, music, books, paintings, photographs, poems, dreams, random conversations, architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water, light and shadows. Select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul. If you do this, your work (and theft) will be authentic. Jim Jarmusch
• Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination Authenticity is invaluable; originality is non-existent. And don’t bother concealing your thievery – celebrate it if you feel like it. Jim Jarmusch
• Select only things to steal that speak directly to your soul. If you do this, your work (and theft) will be authentic. Authenticity is invaluable; originality is nonexistent. Jim Jarmusch
• I love art, I love being thrilled by art, and I love folding these thrills into my own practice. I love stealing….I absolutely believe my best work lies ahead of me, and lies in the work I’m absolutely on fire to steal from. Tom Hart

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Steal ideas

• Never hesitate to steal a good idea. Al Neuharth
• One can steal ideas, but no one can steal execution or passion. Tim Ferriss
• It’s not where you take things from—it’s where you take them to.  Jean-Luc Godard
• Every idea is a juxtaposition. That’s it. A juxtaposition of existing concepts.  Steven Grant
• Copyright? Copy RIGHT: Steal ideas, steal facts but do not steal words. Dan Poynter
• I really don’t want to copy something to a great degree, but I love taking tiny ideas and putting them together. Joe Goddard
• Don’t worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you’ll have to ram them down people’s throats. Howard Aiken“Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work. Gustave Flaubert
• 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. Steve Jobs
• Everything that needs to be said has already been said. But, since no one was listening, everything must be said again. Andre Gide
• 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. R G Collingwood
• All of us, to some extent, borrow from others, from the culture around us. Ideas are in the air, and we may appropriate, often without realizing, the phrases and language of the times. We borrow language itself; we did not invent it. We found it, we grew up into it, though we may use it, interpret it, in very individual ways. What is at issue is not the fact of “borrowing” or “imitating,” of being “derivative,” being “influenced,” but what one does with what is borrowed or imitated or derived; how deeply one assimilates it, takes it into oneself, compounds it with one’s own experiences and thoughts and feelings, places it in relation to oneself, and expresses it in a new way, one’s own.  Oliver Sacks

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Steal the thoughts of others

• Old and new make the warp and woof of every moment. There is no thread that is not a twist of these two strands. By necessity, by proclivity and by delight, we all quote. It is as difficult to appropriate the thoughts of others as it is to invent. Ralph Waldo Emerson

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Steal the thinking behind the style

• Don’t just steal the style, steal the thinking behind the style. You don’t want to look like your heroes, you want to see like your heroes. Austin Kleon

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Steal from your past work

• To spark my creativity…I often re-use pieces from my other works…basically collaging my own stuff… Nate Williams

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Copy what you love

• Copying is about reverse-engineering. Austin Kleon
• Only God creates. The rest of us just copy. Michelangelo
• Start copying what you love. Copy copy copy copy. At the end of the copy, you will find yourself. Yohji Yamamoto
• …get busy copying. Traveling the paths of greatness, even in someone else’s footprints, is a vital means to acquiring skill. Twyla Tharp
• Those who do not want to imitate anything, produce nothing.  Salvador Dali
• Copy your heroes. Examine where you fall short . What’s in there that makes you different? That’s what you should amplify and transform into your own work. Austin Kleon
• Nobody is born with a style or a voice. We don’t out of the womb knowing who we are. In the beginning, we learn by pretending to be our heroes. We learn by copying. Austin Kleon
• A wonderful flaw about human beings is that we’re incapable of making perfect copies. Our failure to copy our heroes is where we discover where our own thing lives. That is how we evolve. Austin Kleon
• You start by copying other people’s paintings or music or whatever. You get all of those skills before you branch out. Really creative people have a fantastic ability to copy things and then combine them in new ways. And whether we’re talking about genes or memes, recombination is the real heart of creativity. Susan Blackmore
• The reason to copy your heroes and their style is so that you might somehow get a glimpse into their minds. That’s what you really want – to internalize their way of looking at the wold. If you just mimic the surface of somebody’s work without understanding where they are coming from, your work will never be anything more that a knockoff. Austin Kleon

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Copy but don’t imitate

• If you can’t imitate him, don’t copy him. Yogi Berra
• The bad artists imitate, the great artists steal. Banksy
• Immature artists imitate. Mature artists steal. Lionel Trilling
• At some point, you’ll have to move from imitating your heroes to emulating them. Imitation is about copying. Emulation is when imitation goes one step further, breaking through into your own thing. Austin Kleon

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Piece together existing things

• My hobby (one of them anyway)…is using a lot of scotch tape… My hobby is to pick out different things during what I read and piece them together and make a little story of my own. Louis Armstrong
• Sometimes I think everything I draw is just a combination of all of the millions and millions of drawings I’ve seen. Dash Shaw
• Some one may say of me, that I have here only made a nosegay of other men’s flowers, having furnished nothing of my own but the thread to tie them. Michel de Montaigne

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On a lighter note

• Anticipatory plagiarism occurs when someone steals your original idea and publishes it a hundred years before you were born. Robert K. Merton