Steven Patrick Morrissey Quotes

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

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

Most authors steal their works, or buy.

We call ourselves creators and we just copy.

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

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.

People try to put ownership on things: 'That's mine, that's my joke.' No such thing. Like if you tripped or stumbled and people go, 'Oh, that's Charlie Chaplin.' You know what I mean? You can't own a joke. You can be the guy that tells it the best, but you can't own a joke. Nowhere can you own a laugh.

If we steal thoughts from the moderns, it will be cried down as plagiarism; if from the ancients, it will be cried up as erudition.

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

I had no ghost writers for the books - I wrote every line myself.

Don't take what someone else has made sure of and pretend it's you yourself that have made sure of it till it's yours absolutely by conviction. It's stealing to take it and hypocrisy and you'll fall into a hole.

Imitation isn't the sincerest form of flattery - it's plagiarism.

The human plagiarism which is most difficult to avoid, for individuals... is the plagiarism of ourselves.

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

Plagiarism is necessary, progress implies it

They're singing your praises while stealing your phrases.

This song ain't black or white and as far as I know it don't infringe on anyone's copyright.

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

It's not that you get a cliché and then wiggle it about or use synonyms. You don't take an ordinary decorative paragraph and give it style. What you're trying to do is be faithful to your perceptions and transmit them as faithfully as you can. I say these sentences until they sound right. There's no objective reason why they're right. They just sound right to me.

Readers would email me and say, 'Please write a novel about so-and-so,' but it has to come from yourself and not so much from your readership.

People have to respect intellectual property.

When a writer tries to copy another writer, it's doomed to fail.

I don't think anybody came into the movie business to be unoriginal and plagiarising and not having an original idea in their brain.

If one uses music that one does not really love, then one will not succeed in making it one's own.

The story and the characters of 'Girl Online' are mine.