Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

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.

Most authors steal their works, or buy.

I have myself always been terrified of plagiarism - of being accused of it, that is. Every writer is a thief, though some of us are more clever than others at disguising our robberies. The reason writers are such slow readers is that we are ceaselessly searching for things we can steal and then pass off as our own: a natty bit of syntax, a seamless transition, a metaphor that jumps to its target like an arrow shot from an aluminum crossbow.

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

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.

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

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.

Most books today seemed to have been written overnight from books read the day before.

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.

I steal from every movie ever made.

Self-plagiarism is style.

They lard their lean books with the fat of others work.

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.

I have an unconscious burglar living in my mind: If I read something, it's mine. I can read Middle English stories, Geoffrey Chaucer or Sir Thomas Malory, but once I start moving in the direction of contemporary fantasy, my mind begins to take over.

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

Mr. Fitzgerald, I believe that is how he spells his name, seems to believe that plagiarism begins at home.

Since [some] American publishers pay nothing to the English authors whose stories they appropriate and publish, other American publishers can not to afford to pay American authors for writing stories.

While I am not a journalist, I have, myself, written more than one thing that has been plagiarized in the past.

Plagiarism is basic to all culture

For such kind of borrowing as this, if it be not bettered by the borrowers, among good authors is accounted Plagiarè.

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.

A real writer learns from earlier writers the way a boy learns from an apple orchard -- by stealing what he has a taste for, and can carry off

Ah, yes! I wrote the "Purple Cow" - I'm sorry, now, I wrote it! But I can tell you anyhow, I'll kill you if you quote it!

They're singing your praises while stealing your phrases.