Fredric Jameson, clearing his throat before a long piece (from 2007) on the half-centennial of Garcia Garquez’s One Hundred Years Of Solitude:

Influence is not a kind of copying, it is permission unexpectedly received to do things in new ways, to broach new content, to tell stories by way of forms you never knew you were allowed to use.

(Stumbled into from his more recent review of the new Olga Tokarczuk, which is being received with varying intensities of rapture in all sorts of places, though which all such rapturous receptions seem to suggest is quite a challenging work.)