Lewis Carroll Quotes

Authors from whom others steal should not complain, but rejoice. Where there is no game there are no poachers.

Originality is undetected plagiarism.

It is easy to club people together, but there are bound to be influences of authors you've read. I grew up reading fast paced authors such as Sidney Sheldon and Jeffrey Archer, but to say I'm one of them isn't true; my style is intrinsically my own.

Originality is nothing but judicious imitation. The most original writers borrowed one from another.

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

All writers are mimics, and I'm not interested in picking up somebody else's style or voice.

If you copy then it is not self-expression.

The impact of any particular writer on your own work is hard to discern.

I got everything from someone. Nobody can be original.

A lot of things you just stumble into: relationships or ways of putting characters opposite one another that really worked. So then it's not always so much about imitating other people, but imitating yourself, at least in your thinking.

What is originality? Undetected plagiarism.

Try as I might, Agatha Christie is unique. The actual writing style can't be exactly the same, so instead of trying to replicate it exactly, the way I got around it was by inventing a new narrator.

If you can't plagiarise yourself, who can you plagiarise?

It's pretty rare that something I've written is close to something that's pre-existed.

I'm a big fan of Nora Ephron, who believed everything is copy, and I agree.

In many senses, creativity and 'plagiarism' are nearly indivisible.

And one might therefore say of me that in this book I have only made up a bunch of other people's flowers, and that of my own I have only provided the string that ties them together.

The greater part of our writers have become so original, that no one cares to imitate them: and those who never quote in return are seldom quoted.

An illustrator in my own mind - and this is not a truth of any kind - is someone who so falls in love with writing that he wishes he had written it, and the closest he can get to is illustrating it. And the next thing you learn, you have to find something unique in this book, which perhaps even the author was not entirely aware of. And that's what you hold on to, and that's what you add to the pictures: a whole Other Story that you believe in, that you think is there.

Writing your own story around the same ideas is not plagiarism; at worst, it's being unoriginal.

PLAGIARIZE, v. To take the thought or style of another writer whom one has never, never read.

I looked at the world of books and just went, Oh my gosh, if I'm writing novels, I'm on the same shelves as Jane Austen and Charles Dickens and Petronius - whereas with comics, they've only been doing them for a hundred years, and there's stuff that nobody's done before. I think I'll go off and do some of the stuff no one's ever done before.

Art is either revolution or plagiarism

Stale is stale and borrowed is borrowed, no matter how original your models may have been.

I do hear snippets on the radio. I do hear a little bit of me, sometimes great chunks of me. But I have to take that as a compliment; there's no way you can get sour grapes about that. But if somebody starts taking your whole new thing lock, stock, and barrel, and do their own version of it before you do it, that's not on.