twenty-eight years and a million words
One of the websites where I "published" the dissertation for my master's degree reports that that svelte 40,000 words has now been read 700 times. Lots of desperate students, I suppose.
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