twenty-seven years and one million words
The boy continues to surprise me with his improving English. Today I made him a new train track layout and he told me, "thank you for making the train tracks, daddy".
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 than that from which it is 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.
—T.S. Eliot