Quentin Tarantino:
“The only artistic training I had was as an actor. An actor has a very different aesthetic conception from a director or a writer. He uses what works. Without betraying the truth of my style, my rhythm or voice, when I saw something I liked in Marlon Brando or Michael Caine, I’d use it in my own acting. Actors work like this: they steal from others and make it part of themselves. I don’t consider myself just as a director, but as a movie man who has the whole treasure of the movies to choose from and can take whatever gems I like, twist them around, give them new form, bring things together that have never been matched up before.”
David Bowie:
“The only art I’ll ever study is stuff that I can steal from.”
Bruce Lee:
“Research your own experience. Absorb what is useful, reject what is useless, add what is essentially your own.”
Ecclesiastes 1:9-10 (NIV):
“What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun. Is there anything of which one can say, “Look! This is something new”? It was here already, long ago; it was here before our time.”
T. S. Eliot:
“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.”
Timbaland:
“You should never copy what’s been done. You should always try to innovate what’s been done… to make me reminisce what’s been done. Take from the past, and add on to the future.”
Kobe Bryant:
“I seriously have stolen all my moves from the greatest players. There isn’t a move that’s a new move. There’s nothing that hasn’t been done before.”
Ryan Hall:
“We all stand on the shoulders of giants. We stand on the shoulders of great people who’ve gone before us. And I think that just because we don’t know their names, it doesn’t mean they’re not out there.”