i was in a pub in ireland once. it was around lunch time. the pub was mostly empty. suddenly, a dog nosed his way through the front door. He walked up to the bar and looked up at the bartender making that worried sound dogs make. Without missing a beat the bartender looked up from his newspaper and said to the dog “He’s not here. You might try Murphy’s”. The dog apparently understood this and immediately left the bar. Presumably to go to Murphy’s bar up the street in search of his owner.

nobody batted an eyelid. meanwhile i was choking on my pint in disbelief. has to be a guinness ad in there somewhere i immediately thought.

“If, with the literate, I am impelled to make an epigram,
I never seek to take the credit; we all assume that Oscar said it.”
- Dorothy Parker

And this from the CSI Fan Fiction site:

Grissom’s smile widened even further as he squinted to read, in Sara’s best attempt at a legible hand, the inscription on the front piece:

Gil – For all the times you are in want of words remember - “Talent borrows, genius steals” – Oscar Wilde
- Sara

He cocked his head to one side and said, “I thought you said that quotation was a serviceable substitute for wit.”

“I believe that was Oscar Wilde as well,” she countered.

I thought that trying to locate the source of this quote would make a good mental breakfast this morning and an interesting topic for research; the outcome of which is the *toasty* irony that the source of this quote (on stealing ideas) is quite obscured by the broad array of famous idea-men to whom the quote is attributed, and to whom the thought police could just as easily be issuing warrants at this moment for STEALING it. There is some post-modern lesson in there somewhere.

Cut to the chase: a quick search on the internet provides the following list of people to whom the quote is attributed

Allen, Woody
Beecham, Sir Thomas
Dali, Salvador
Elliot, T.S.
Marx, Groucho
Picasso, Pablo
Stravinsky, Igor
Wilde, Oscar
Zimmerman, Robert

I will offer the following evidence, though, with the hope that a pre-1932 citation can be found. The game is on.

T.S. Eliot in his essay “Philip Massinger” wrote:

“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. Chapman borrowed from Seneca; Shakespeare and Webster from Montaigne.”

- Selected Essays, 1917-1932 (New York: Harcourt, Brace, c1932), page 182.

mm