Art & Creativity Quote by Franklin P. Jones

Originality, in Franklin P. Jones's hands, is less a halo than a hustle. The line lands with a journalist's dry squint: in a culture that worships the lone genius, Jones reminds you that most "new" ideas are old ones with better tailoring. The punch isn't that borrowing happens; it's that we reward the borrower who borrows well enough to make the borrowing invisible.

The intent is both corrective and mischievous. Jones punctures romantic myths about creativity while also winking at the practical craft of making something feel fresh. "Art" is the key word: he's not defending plagiarism so much as describing the skilled transformation of influences into a voice that reads as singular. It frames originality as an editorial act - selection, recombination, emphasis - rather than a lightning strike from nowhere.

The subtext carries a quiet indictment of gatekeepers and audiences. If originality is "concealing your source", then our taste is partly a taste for amnesia. We applaud novelty when it doesn't make us do the awkward work of recognizing antecedents, debts, and lineages. There's also a media-world jab: journalists live by aggregation, synthesis, and the clean narrative arc. Credit is ethical, but clean storytelling often depends on smoothing the seams.

Context matters: Jones worked in a 20th-century ecosystem of wire services, syndicated columns, and recycled anecdotes, long before today's remix culture and viral templates made the mechanics obvious. The quote reads like an early diagnosis of our current internet condition: everything is referential, and the real competition is presentation. The cynicism isn't bitter; it's clarifying.