When I first heard the quote in 1983, it was attributed to Victor Hugo (1802-1885), not Pablo Picasso (1881-1973), and it was phrased as “poor artists imitate, good artists copy and great artists steal”. To me, it meant that a lesser artist doesn’t even have the skills to reproduce another artist’s work well, that a good artist has the skills to match the original artist’s work, and that a great artist can steal the essence of another idea and make it their own surpassing the original artist’s work entirely. Despite the invention of the Internet since then, I have not been able to find that particular line in any writing by Hugo, but I have found reasons to give him partial original credit nonetheless.

In February 1846, Victor Hugo observed a thin young man being arrested for stealing a loaf of bread, and he realized that the man was the “specter of la misère, of poverty”. Hugo thought deeply about theft, motive, desperation, and justice, and he wrote extensively on social injustice for the rest of his life. Ten years after witnessing the young man’s misfortune, writing in exile, Victor Hugo immortalized this indelible inspirational image in his novel, Les Misérables, making it the fateful event in his character Jean Valjean’s life.

“In days gone by, to live I stole a loaf of bread; today, to live I will not steal a name.”

Years after Hugo’s death, his compatriot Anatole France wrote another of my favorite quotes, doubtless inspired by Hugo’s ideas on theft and injustice.

“The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich and the poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets and to steal bread”.

Hugo was a strong lifetime advocate of two sometimes opposing positions. First he believed that ideas are inevitably free, writing that “an invasion of ideas cannot be resisted” and that “nothing is more powerful than an idea whose time has come”. And second that artists deserved credit for their work. Hugo co-founded the movement for intellectual property to be protected by international copyright, believing that ideas added something of value to the world, constructively.

Anatole France, by juxtaposing “majestic equality” with the poverty-driven crime of stealing bread, distilled Hugo’s original epic rant about how the law unjustly criminalizes poverty and adds an unfair burden upon the poor in an unequal society into a quotable thought-provoking insight. Hugo perhaps would have been flattered by the imitation of his observation, and Hugo understood that each value-added portion of an idea deserves recognition. When someone merely takes another person’s idea without attribution to sell as their own, that’s plagiarism, which Hugo fought against.

But Hugo also certainly knew that it is the truth of the idea that gives it its power, which raises the question of whether the artist truly owns the underlying truth of an idea or not. Does the whale’s song belong to the scientists who recorded it, the artist who first set it to music, the company that now owns the digital rights, or to the whale? Often, theft is essential for ideas to be free.

While I believe the debate over stealing ideas began in France, it was the Harvard-educated poet T.S. Eliot who first framed it well in English when he wrote the following.

“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.”

Here is the essence of value-added creativity. When an artist steals an idea and transforms it into something unique, better or at least different, then they deserve recognition for adding value. They are helping the idea evolve and improve, if it can.

Make no mistake, most stealing is terribly uncreative. Digital piracy alone is worth hundreds of billions annually, and the pirates are literally producing copies, by definition uncreative. Shoplifting isn’t original. And wage theft happens like clockwork, paycheck after paycheck.

The motive for most theft is instinctual—I want it—, or rational—I can take the money without anyone knowing—, but the motive for common theft is neither moral nor creative. In contrast, the motive for an artist to steal an idea is that they recognize that an idea still has untapped potential, and that they have the unique skills or viewpoint to express it in a new, different and better way. The artist works to free the idea by helping it evolve.

Pablo Picasso certainly exhibited this artistic felonious habit in his work, taking ideas and transforming them into something unique and utterly different, so there’s something appropriate about crediting the great artist with the quote. But I still think Victor Hugo deserves credit, since he helped us understand that good people sometimes have to steal for good reasons, that laws can be inflexibly misused by the powerful against the powerless, and that ideas are an irresistible force that cannot be imprisoned.