Jonathan Franzen Quotes

Be careful that you do not write or paint anything that is not your own, that you don't know in your own soul.

Plagiarism has been around far longer than the Internet. In fact, I had a poem published in 'Seventeen' magazine when I was 15 years old. About a year later I was informed that there was a girl who used that same poem to win a statewide poetry competition in Alabama. It took months for people to put together that this had happened.

There's a difference between hiring writers and stealing jokes.

When I created the email in the U.S., my mentor could have easily copyrighted it and taken credit for it.

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

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

Originality is undetected plagiarism.

No, generally I think influence is used as a nice word for plagiarism.

Too afraid of plagiarising someone, so I stopped reading fiction in 1981.

If you copy then it is not self-expression.

I decided that if my work contained what I could identify as a likeness to other work, I would remove it.'

Even in the beginning, when we knew there was a legal argument about how much our song sounds like his song, as one songwriter to another, I wasn't sure that Cat Stevens would take that as bad.

It seems like every few years a big name author will holler something about how evil, heinous, and morally wrong fan fiction and fan fiction writers are, and then the Internet gets all upset and shocked, and then the author is shocked that people could get so upset.

I think people who sample are cheating. It is like people who do collages. Use all of your own stuff.

I've thought of publishing a book of my hate mail, but I don't own the rights to the letters.

I wasn't political enough to write articles about myself or go to cocktail parties, meaning that not only has my art been pirated and my intellectual property rights stolen, but my work has been misrepresented.

What is originality? Undetected plagiarism.

In our day the conventional element in literature is elaborately disguised by a law of copyright pretending that every work of art is an invention distinctive enough to be patented.

No one likes to work for free. To copy an artist's work and download it free is stealing. It's hard work writing and recording music, and it's morally wrong to steal it.

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

Never steal jokes.

I firmly believe in copyrights and am put off by plagiarism.

It's one thing if you write a song and somebody else sings it because you give the OK. But if your voice is on something and you don't get the credit, it's kind of hard.

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.

I rather want my things to be copied than me copying. I would feel ashamed!