Bob Dylan describes his creative process as one of love and theft. You fall in love and then you steal it. Of course, you have to make it your own, or else that’s just straight-up theft – that’s just straight-up copyright violation – but that’s really what the creative process is all about.

We kind of romanticize creativity as inventing ideas out of thin air. When you actually deconstruct even the most radical new ideas, they’re often just a new connection between old ideas. They’re transplanting a solution from problem space to another. Whether it’s the Gutenberg printing press, which is really just wine-press technology applied to letters and words, or even the Google Search algorithm – the basic logic of that algorithm was the logic that academics had been using for decades...

Source: Jonah Lerer, Steve Jobs was Right to Steal and Beer is Inspiring.

Creativity is just connecting things.

Great distillation of the creativity. I think I'd only have to weave in iteration somewhere in there to make it more accurate, at the expense of conciseness.