Nothing is truly new in this world.
This sentence sounds cliché. Yet it remains alive because it is the reality. Even the most flashy creative industries stand on piles of replication, imitation, and modification.
Steve Jobs once quoted a popular line in 1996 in the PBS documentary series Triumph of the Nerds. He said, “Good artists copy, great artists steal,” attributing it to Pablo Picasso.
If traced genealogically, other versions of that Pablo Picasso quote can be found. Some write, “Bad artists copy, great artists steal.”
Then there’s William Faulkner’s version in 1974, based on an attribution printed in Design for the Stage: First Steps, saying, “Immature artists copy, great artists steal.” There is also a writing by Lionel Trilling stating, “Immature artists imitate, mature artists steal.”
Traces of similar ideas can even be traced back to the notes of music critic Peter Yates in his book Twentieth Century Music (1967), where he heard Igor Stravinsky say, “A good composer does not imitate, he steals. Lesser artists borrow, great artists steal.”
And when we go further back, T.S. Eliot once wrote it in a sharper form, about bad poets and good poets.
Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, a better, or at least something different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different from that from which it was 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.
- T.S. Eliot (1920)
Previously, a writing from W.H. Davenport Adams (1892) was also found saying, “Great poets imitate and improve, whereas small ones steal and spoil.”
The point is clear. Even quotes from popular figures about copying are the result of copying from authors before them. Everyone copies; that is the reality.
At this point, many people are tempted to jump to a hasty conclusion: if everyone copies, then there is nothing wrong with copying other people’s work. If great figures admit to “stealing ideas,” then it is legitimate for us to do the same without moral burden.
But perhaps the problem is not in the fact that we all copy. The problem lies in how we copy. Certainly, copying is not automatically wrong. But stealing is clearly wrong.
The two seem close, but they are actually in different classes.
Plagiarism is the use of someone else’s ideas, structure, or expression as if they were born from our own heads, without adequate transformation and without attribution to the source. This is not just a technical error; it may well be an ethical defect.
Meanwhile, learning through copying is the most human creative process.
We learn to speak by copying. We learn to walk by copying. We learn to write by copying. No one immediately becomes themselves without passing through the phase of copying “others” first.
What determines our quality is not whether we copy, but what we do after copying.
If we copy from one source and copy it almost intact, that is plagiarism.
If we copy from many sources, cross-pollinate them, and then form a new structure that has its own flow, it means we are doing research.
If we absorb even wider sources as references and produce something that brings out a new flavor, not just a new form, then we are heading towards originality.
It is not the number of sources that is the determinant. But because the mental process and execution change.
There is an art that people often ignore when talking about creativity: transformation.
Austin Kleon simplifies this through the idea of Steal Like an Artist. If we strip away the provocative term “steal,” the core message remains healthy: creativity does not come from a vacuum; it is born from a combination of influences processed consciously.
We can formulate it into three practical steps:
- Copy
- Transform
- Combine
Many people stop at the first step. They admire someone’s work, then copy it without asking what makes that work alive. More seriously, they copy not to learn, but to replace the thinking process.
Many people want to be “original” too quickly. They wait for pure inspiration, ideas that have never been touched by anyone, and work that is completely free from influence.
The problem is, that standard is unrealistic.
Worse, that standard often becomes an intellectual-sounding excuse to procrastinate.
Just start.
Once again, nothing is truly original in this world. All human creations can be traced back to previous sources genealogically.