MISATTRIBUTED
Bad artists copy. Good artists steal.
Misattributed
Widely shared under this name, but not theirs.
This quote is commonly circulated under the author's name, but it does not appear in their known works. The true origin is unconfirmed — likely a later paraphrase.
Editorial Note
This line is popularly stamped on Pablo Picasso — most often in the form "Good artists copy; great artists steal" — but no letter, interview, essay, or recorded statement of his has ever been found containing either wording, and the trail leads elsewhere. The antithetical imitate-versus-steal construction is documented decades before Picasso became attached to it: T. S. Eliot wrote in his 1920 essay "Philip Massinger" (in The Sacred Wood), "Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better," and an even earlier precursor appears in W. H. Davenport Adams's 1892 Gentleman's Magazine piece "Imitators and Plagiarists." The specific "bad artists copy / good artists steal" phrasing submitted here actually mirrors Eliot's good/bad framing more closely than the familiar Picasso "good/great" version. The Picasso credit surged in the culture largely after Steve Jobs recited it and attributed it to Picasso in the 1996 PBS documentary "Triumph of the Nerds," but a genuinely earlier, named origin exists in print, so we file this as misattributed rather than merely unsupported.
