Michelangelo
Sculptor, Painter, Architect, Poet
"Only God creates. The rest of us just copy."
Copying quotes
Copying
101 quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
Tracy Kidder
Author
"The hardest thing was learning to write. I was 13, and the only writing I had done was for Social Studies. It consisted of copying passages right out of the encyclopedia"
Lana Del Rey
Singer-Songwriter
"The world needs poetry now more than ever. It's the only thing that can keep music from copying itself and sounding the same."
Boris Pasternak
Poet, Novelist
"As far as modern writing is concerned, it is rarely rewarding to translate it, although it might be easy. Translation is very much like copying paintings."
Jimi Hendrix
Musician, Guitarist
"They've imitated me so good that sometimes I hear people copying my mistakes"
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Copying quotes (page 1 of 6)
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"It is frivolous to fix pedantically the date of particular inventions. They have all been invented over and over fifty times. Man is the arch machine, of which all these shifts drawn from himself are toy models. He helps himself on each emergency by copying or duplicating his own structure, just so far as then need is."
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"You cannot innovate by copying."
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"To model an object is to possess it."
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"The shortest road to ruin is to emulate the methods of your adversary."
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"Being a cover artist is not like being a real artist. That's just copying what someone else did."
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"The best author is a dead author, because he's out of your way and you own the play. Take what he has given you and use it for what you need."
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"I hold flesh-food to be unsuited to our species. We err in copying the lower animal world if we are superior to it."
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"If a spectacle is going to be particularly imposing I prefer to see it through somebody else's eyes, because that man will always exaggerate. Then I can exaggerate his exaggeration, and my account of the thing will be the most impressive."
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"Without moving beyond a mere copy, there is no artistry, no originality or artistic advancement; only mechanics."
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"In other words, musicians know that going back to the Spoonful, what we were doing was not copying."
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"The great use of copying, if it be at all useful, should seem to be in learning color; yet even coloring will never be perfectly attained by servilely copying the model before you."
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"No art can be grafted with success on another art. For though they all profess the same origin, and to proceed from the same stock, yet each has its own peculiar modes both of imitating nature and of deviating from it... The deviation, more especially, will not bear transplantation to another soil."
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"Are you copying others? People won't pay extra for that. You won't be followed for that."
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"I read an article on me once that described my machine-method of silk-screen copying and painting: 'What a bold and audacious solution, what depths of the man are revealed in this solution!' What does that mean?"
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"The only way you can better John is by copying him exactly."
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"I believe I do much better for the time being by first copying some good things than by working without that foundation"
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"Imagine you're copying a very long document, and occasionally you'll put an A where there should be a C. And that mistake has been translated down through the generations, and more mistakes have accumulated. So the longer the lineage has been in existence, the more mistakes the sequence is going to have."
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"A copying artist should get permission or pay the original artist a fee."
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"I rather want my things to be copied than me copying. I would feel ashamed!"
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