Success Quote by Gene Fowler

Fowler’s line is a neat little contraband package: advice smuggled inside a confession about how art actually gets made. As a journalist from the era when every city had multiple papers and originality was less a brand than a deadline requirement, he’s pointing to craft as absorption, not inspiration. Read good writing, he says, until it becomes muscle memory. The “remember it” is the apprenticeship stage: you take note of cadence, structure, how a sentence pivots, how a paragraph lands.

Then comes the wink: “forget where you remember it from.” It’s funny because it’s true, and slightly disreputable because it skirts the edge of plagiarism without tumbling over. Fowler isn’t endorsing theft so much as describing the psychological reality of influence. We internalize what we admire, and later it reappears wearing our voice, stripped of its original label. That’s how style is built: not from pristine originality, but from a compost heap of other people’s best moves, broken down and reassembled.

The subtext is also a quiet rebuke to the myth of the lone genius. Fowler is telling ambitious writers to stop waiting for authenticity to descend like a halo and start doing the unglamorous work of close reading. In a newsroom culture that prized speed, clarity, and impact, “good writing” wasn’t ornamental; it was a tool. His punchline lands because it acknowledges the ethics anxiety while insisting that imitation, properly digested, is less a sin than a stage of becoming.