"Brilliance innovates. Genius steals."

 

Michael Blowhard says:

I subscribe to a New Urbanist view of fiction, in other words: take what people have demonstrated a longtime preference for, accept those terms, and then work with them.

Didn't Shakespeare do something like that?

Comments

[Chris Burd]

Oscar Wilde: "Good writers borrow. Great writers steal."

[David Sucher]

Chris, Are you quite sure?
Not exactly the same thought but interesting.
Thanks!

A friend told me "Brilliance innovates..." years ago and he wasn't sure where it came from...No, now that I remember it, he told me that he had made it up! :)

[Glen Raphael]

As I understand it, the anti-Stratfordian position is that Shakespeare bought, thus staying true to the principle "neither a borrower nor a lender be." :-)

[Chris Burd]

I've had no success in verifying my Wilde quote (several internet sources ascribe it to him, but none give a source), so I've concluded that it's one of witticisms that just floats around the culture, getting ascribed to Wilde one day, Mark Twain the next, H.L. Mencken the day after that.

There's a related maxim, "Good artists borrow; great artists steal" that gets ascribed to either Picasso or Salvador Dali.

[Dave Lull]

T.S. Eliot in his essay "Philip Massinger" wrote:

"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 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. Chapman borrowed from Seneca; Shakespeare and Webster from Montaigne."

_Selected Essays, 1917-1932_ (New York: Harcourt, Brace, c1932), page 182.