Great artists copy, bad artists steal

"Good artists copy, great artists steal" is an overrated creativity blurb

"Good artists copy, great artists steal" is one of the most popular and provocative quotes about creativity.

The reason... Steve Jobs.

Steve Jobs in The Last Interview

In The Lost Interview, Jobs said this:

Picasso had a saying. He said, “Good artists copy. Great artists steal."

Picasso definitely did not say that. I'll come back to that.

But first: I never liked this quote. Here's why.

A positive reading

Before I get to why this quote is overrated, let me give it a charitable reading first.

Copying is a tentative and mediocre act.

Stealing is bold. You're committing. You're stealing from someone, admitting it, and y'know what, they stole too.

You're accepting that what you are doing is morally ambiguous. You are taking someone else's work and making it your own.

“Good artists copy, great artists steal" is counterintuitive and polarizing and provocative. It's brash.

And it's enigmatic. Its meaning is unclear, which sets us off on a journey of discovery.

Actually, nah

You certainly can read like it I've described above, but it's a stretch. You have to add a lot of your own meaning to get there.

I think “good artists copy, great artists steal" is all style, no substance. It's splashy and confusing. It sounds interesting but it's meaningless. And worse, it's kinda amoral.

For me, stealing is, at best, ripping someone off. At worst, it’s plagiarism. It's taking too much from one person then saying it's yours. Simple as that.

On the other hand, copying is a perfectly natural thing humans do. We do it all the time and could not survive with it. Copying is mostly good.

You are better served by thinking of imitation as copying rather than stealing. You are copying when you imitate other creations, so long as you use their work in a new way or transform it. Otherwise, you need to say you copied it.

Most importantly, “good artists copy, great artists steal" isn't insightful. There isn't a deep truth at its heart. It's empty.

Other famous quotes about creativity contain small lessons.

"The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources"
Albert Einstein?

There is wisdom to this. No matter how original someone seems, they are copying from others.

If you steal from one author, it’s plagiarism; if you steal from many, it’s research.
Steven Wright?

Again, stealing is taking too much from a single source. When you draw from many sources, you are learning the language of a domain and your work likely won’t resemble any particular person that much.

So who said it?

Picasso never said, “good artists copy, great artists steal." So who did?

Here's some wisdom, folks: beware of pithy quotes you find on the internet. Very often, they were not said by anyone in particular.

Matter of fact, the other two creativity quotes above were not said by Einstein or Wright. Like "good artists copy, great artists steal," they have murky origins.

Who said, "good artists copy, great artists steal"? Far as I can tell. Steve Jobs did. He transformed a line he'd heard somewhere and misattributed it. It seems like something Picasso would say.

For me, "good artists copy, great artists steal" is not insightful. But you know what is? The entirety of what Jobs response. Here's the full quote.

Ultimately, it comes down to taste. It comes down to taste. It comes down to trying to expose yourself to the best things that humans have done, and then try to bring those things into what you are doing. Picasso had a saying. He said, “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. But if it hadn’t been for computer science, these people would have all been doing amazing things in life in other fields. And they brought with them, we all bought to this effort, a very liberal arts air, a very liberal arts attitude that we wanted to pull in the best that we saw in these other fields into this field. And I don’t think you get that if you’re very narrow.**

I don't know when I heard Jobs say this, but it very well could be one of the inspirations for Everything is a Remix. Jobs was not just a great innovator, he was a great illuminator of creativity.