St. Lucia Quotes

What is originality? Undetected plagiarism.

You can't copy anybody and end with anything. If you copy, it means you're working without any real feeling.

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

To copy others is necessary, but to copy oneself is pathetic.

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

And I don't want people to think that I make movies based on other films.

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

All bad Literature rests upon imperfect insight, or upon imitation, which may be defined as seeing at second-hand.

Originality is undetected plagiarism.

We call ourselves creators and we just copy.

I'm a writer who likes to be influenced.

I realized that I could try to sound like Waylon Jennings, or I could try to be like Waylon Jennings... but it's impossible to do both.

No one can write like Vallejo and not sound like a fraud. He's just too much himself and not you.

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

I take stuff because I'm inspired by it.

There were times in my career when I would try to write songs like Bob Dylan... Artists get hooked up in that. To be a follower, you lose.

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

Art is either plagiarism or revolution.

You can't make experimental work by copying past work.

I got everything from someone. Nobody can be original.

Hey, Christian rock, if you want to be good, stop copying U2. U2 already did it. You know what I mean? There's a lot of U2-esque Christian rock.

I'd rather do my own performance than copy someone else's.

Your manuscript is both good and original; but the part that is good is not original, and the part that is original is not good.

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

When you put something out there into the world, there's all these words you don't want to hear, that you hope people don't say. I don't like anything that starts with 're' - like retro, reinvent, recreate - I hate that. It's always like living in the past - copying, emulating.