Nina Bawden Quotes

When it comes to other people's writing, my older influences are more powerful than more recent ones, partially because I'm now more worried that I'll suddenly accidentally steal something from another writer.

Good writers borrow from other writers. Great writers steal from them outright.

I steal from every movie ever made.

All writers are magpies, right? We're always stealing bits from different places and then weaving them into our little nest.

All writers steal. You might as well steal from the best.

I rip off of every movie and TV show I've ever seen in my life.

Plagiarism is basic to all culture

As not every instance of similitude can be considered as a proof of imitation, so not every imitation ought to be stigmatised as plagiarism. The adoption of a noble sentiment, or the insertion of a borrowed ornament, may sometimes display so much judgment as will almost compensate for invention; and an inferior genius may, without any imputation of servility, pursue the paths of the ancients, provided he declines to tread in their footsteps.

If Shakespeare had lived in our age, he would have been sued for writing Romeo And Juliet, because as everybody knows, he plagiarized that from an Italian play.

Writers are the most terrible kleptomaniacs.

There's a lot of thievery involved in writing. You're breaking into other people's spaces and other people's stories.

Inspiration and stealing are two completely different things. If somebody wants to make a song like "Stairway to Heaven" and writes a song on acoustic guitar, Led Zeppelin does not own every song that's on acoustic guitar for the rest of time.

I have stolen ideas from every book I have ever read.

Sometimes a line enters your head, and you're so grateful for it. You go online to check to see if anyone wrote it before you. You must have stolen it.

Once you get into the world of dystopia, it's hard to avoid plagiarism, because other people have had such powerful visions.

I don't read much of what I write because I worry about unintentionally borrowing something.

I don't steal stories. If I'm a plagiarist, so is Hitchcock. And Tolkien. And Shakespeare.

Everyone steals from something or someone.

That is why the analogy of stealing does not work. With a thief, we want to know how much money he stole, and from whom. With the artist it is not how much he took and from whom, but what he did with it.

I'm a plagiarist - I always look back at other movies, and I steal, but I steal well, and I reinvent.

About the most originality that any writer can hope to achieve honestly is to steal with good judgment.

I am suspicious of writers who say their work is original and influenced by nobody. If it is, it is probably uninteresting. The biggest source of novels is other novels.

It's so funny, I'm always stealing from Moliere, and nobody ever notices. I steal from him willy-nilly.

As monarchs have a right to call in the specie of a state, and raise its value, by their own impression; so are there certain prerogative geniuses, who are above plagiaries, who cannot be said to steal, but, from their improvement of a thought, rather to borrow it, and repay the commonwealth of letters with interest again; and may wore properly be said to adopt, than to kidnap a sentiment, by leaving it heir to their own fame.

Genius Borrows nobly.