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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/35581
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Well, first of all, Picasso never said it. Please see, for example, this investigation which could find [no evidence to suggest Picasso ever said this](https://quoteinvestigator.com/2013/03/06/artists-steal/). In fact, the earliest quote that could be found to resemble the non-Picasso quote was by W. H. Davenport Adams, who wrote "That great poets imitate and improve, whereas small ones steal and spoil." T. S. Elliot expanded on this further much later in “The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism”:

> One of the surest of tests 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 from that from which it was 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.

Regardless of the fact that Picasso never said it, the meaning behind it is likely far more in line with what T. S. Elliot says here. It shouldn't be taken as literally stealing someone's work and claiming it as your own. The fact is, what you write has likely been written before. It is a great writer who can stand on the shoulders of giants and make something unique from what has gone before. The concept of "stealing" in this sense is not to be taken literally at all, but is used to convey the idea that poets, musicians, artists and writers know the history of their craft, and are able to take it and transcend it and do it better than those that did it before them.

Original score: 8