Quotes & Sayings About Artists Stealing

In my art history degree course, we did a module on palimpsests - medieval sheets of parchment so costly that, once the text was no longer needed, the sheets were simply scraped clean and reused, leaving the old writing faintly visible through the new. Later, Renaissance artists used the word pentimenti, repentances, to describe mistakes or alterations that were covered with new paint, only to be revealed years or even centuries later as the paint thinned with time, leaving both the original and the revision on view.

Sometimes I have a sense that this house - our relationship in it, with it, with each other - is like a palimpsest or pentimento, that however much we try to overpaint Emma Matthews, she keeps tiptoeing back: a faint image, an enigmatic smile, stealing its way into the corner of the frame. — J.P. Delaney

To write without any awareness of a tradition you are trying to become a part of would be self-defeating. Every artist alive responds to the history of his or her art - borrowing, stealing, rebelling against, and building on what other artists have done. — Dorianne Laux

Ultimately, 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're doing. 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

Picasso had a saying - 'good artists copy, great artists steal' - and we have always been shameless about stealing great ideas. — Walter Isaacson

It's nice to sometimes get things out of life, rather than stealing from other artists. I'm trying to steal from the real people. — John Hawkes

The bad artists imitate, the great artists steal, — Banksy

Photography is always a kind of stealing. A theft from the subject. Artists are assaulters in a lot of ways, and the viewer is complicit in that assault. — Hanya Yanagihara

That type of autograph, pictures and apparel thievery was not part of what I grew up with. I loved the artists and their music. I would be thrilled to meet them, but the thought of getting a scribble or stealing an article of clothing never occurred or appealed to me. — Davey Havok