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Jobs..? You mean Pablo Picasso, right?


Jobs attributed it to Picasso, but there's no record that Picasso ever said such a thing.

T.S. Eliot did write something like it:

"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."

That quote was subsequently used in a biography of Picasso by John Richardson. Maybe that's how Jobs came to remember it as a quote by Picasso.

http://nancyprager.wordpress.com/2007/05/08/good-poets-borro...

Hence, it seems like Jobs' version "Good artists copy, great artists steal" was an original.




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