George Orwell Quotes

I'm kind of surprised that so many of those other books were almost exactly like mine. They even follow the form. There were some books that even copied the stamp. It shows so little imagination.

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.

When someone writes something dazzlingly brilliant, people want to imitate it. The result is a lot of less-than-brilliant knock-offs. Elves, Dwarves, Goblin army, cursed ring, evil sorcerer. Tolkien did it. It rocked. Let's move on. Let's do something new.

Bad writers are those who try to express their own feeble ideas in the language of good ones.

Taking something from one man and making it worse is plagiarism.

I think anything created today can be said to be a ripoff. It's hard to find anything original any more.

A facility for quotation covers the absence of original thought.

Few of those who fill the world with books, have any pretensions to the hope either of pleasing or instructing. They have often no other task than to lay two books before them, out of which they compile a third, without any new material of their own, and with very little application of judgment to those which former authors have supplied.

You must neither completely nor partially copy the art of others. If so, you will be producing kitsch.

One of the reasons so many nonfiction books are so boring is because what they've done, very diligently, is fulfill the terms of their proposals. They've written up their proposal, long-form, and often what this does is then set up a sort of serial deal, where the whole book can essentially be reduced back to the size of the original proposal!

Yes, I am influenced by everbody. But every time I put my hands in my pockets I find someone else's fingers there.

How little inventiveness there is in man, Grave copier of copies.

The critic lives at second hand. He writes about. The poem, the novel, or the play must be given to him; criticism exists by the grace of other men's genius.

No one is original. Everyone is derivative.

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

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

If you imitate someone, you owe them a royalty check. If you emulate them, you don't. There's a big difference. Check your lawyer.

Once you start copying other people's licks, you begin thinking they're yours. Doing that's just an easy way out.

Imitation is always insult--not flattery.

there is in this world no line so bad that someone won't someday copy it.

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

Lazy reviewers look up other people's reviews and they write the same thing, so you get people writing crap based on crap.

I just rearrange words into a pleasing order for money.

If all you've got is somebody else's stuff that you've lifted, nothing really deep, then it is going to thin out.

First come the innovators, then come the imitators, then come the idiots.