From Alain by André Maurois:

When I told him I was hoping to become a writer, he advised me to copy, from beginning to end, the eight hundred pages of Stendhal’s La Chartreuse de Parme: “The art of learning,” he would say, “as musicians and painters know, boils down to a long apprenticeship of imitating and copying….” He taught me not to despise the commonplace. “Only fools,” he would say, “think they are being original when they neglect the ideas of previous generations. True originality consists in giving commonplace ideas new shape.”