But he was no mere imitator of received form, whether natural or artificial.
And, of course, there's the danger of seeming like a mere imitator of "Crash" and other forerunners.
Dubbed a national treasure of wit by one critic, in the New Yorker he was once called the natural successor to SJ Perelman - high and unusual praise for a man who had once been criticised as a mere imitator of that magazine's great comic writer.
He seems to enter into a mystic pact with his actors who join him in a passionate attempt to get as close to their subject as possible, to identify with characters and events as though they were reliving them not as mere imitators but as incarnations of those people and events.
Reviewers have used "Grand Theft Auto clone" to describe games that rest on their own merits, and do not necessarily dismiss the entire class of games as mere imitators.
The brothers had declined to enter the competition, supposedly on the grounds that they didn't compete against mere imitators.
A devout Christian, Koch, like the medieval craftsmen he admired, saw the Gothic style as a supreme manifestation of religious spirit; he was no mere imitator but an artist who freely reinterpreted in his types and books the traditional Fraktur type of Germany.
But it's also clear that Pinney is no mere imitator; he creates a style and, what's more, a philosophical world of his own.
Hoping to shed its longstanding industry reputation as a mere imitator, not an innovator, Microsoft is spending heavily on research in a wide range of software technologies that include hand-held computing and voice recognition.
