Painters and poets, you say, have always had an equal license in bold invention. We know; we claim the liberty for ourselves and in turn we give it to others.
Source: In Shorter Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, by John Bartlett, 1937, 1980, 1992.
-- Horace, (Dec 8 65-8 BC), Roman poet, satirist; His Ars Poetica was used as style handbook by 16th-, 17th-c. neoclassicists.