Mary McCarthy Quotes

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

I don't steal stories. If I'm a plagiarist, so is Hitchcock. And Tolkien. And Shakespeare.

If you take my stuff apart, you'll find my choruses of repetitions are picked up almost verbatim from Kurt Vonnegut, and my distanced fracture quality is all from Amy Hempel, who's probably my favourite writer.

I have stolen ideas from every book I have ever read.

Dickens is one of those authors who are well worth stealing.

I am suspicious of writers who say their work is original and influenced by nobody. If it is, it is probably uninteresting. The biggest source of novels is other novels.

Nothing is sillier than this charge of plagiarism. There is no sixth commandment in art. The poet dare help himself wherever he lists, wherever he finds material suited to his work. He may even appropriate entire columns with their carved capitals, if the temple he thus supports be a beautiful one. Goethe understood this very well, and so did Shakespeare before him.

The authour who imitates his predecessors only by furnishing himself with thoughts and elegances out of the same general magazine of literature, can with little more propriety be reproached as a plagiary, than the architect can be censured as a mean copier of Angelo or Wren, because he digs his marble out of the same quarry, squares his stones by the same art, and unites them in columns of the same orders.

Poetry can only be made out of other poems; novels out of other novels.

All novels are sequels; influence is bliss.

Perhaps no poet is a conscious plagiarist, but there seems to be warrant for suspecting that there is no poet who is not at one time or another an unconscious one.

To many writers and thinkers, though not to all, another text is, or can be, the most naked and charged of life-forces ... The concept of allusion or analogue is totally inadequate. To Dante these other texts are the organic context of identity. They are as directly about life as life is about them.

I'm usually the last to see my influence in other people's work. People give me stuff and say "Oh look, this guy's ripping you off," and I'm like "What do you mean?" Often I see the people that I've ripped off filtered into my own work. In other people's work, I can only see specific, tiny little instances of inflections stolen from another artist.

Authors are magpies, echoing each other's words and seizing avidly on anything that glitters.

Life imitates art and back around.

Gerald's Game' had such an impact on me when I read the book in college that I think I've actually, consciously or unconsciously, been incorporating elements of that story into my work ever since.

Murakami's ability to deconstruct and his aesthetic and conceptual freedom have been totally inspiring for me.

I enjoy going to shows to study other artists. It is important to always remain a student to my craft.

Exposing yourself to many kinds of art can only lead to amazing things. It helps you learn about your own art, your own taste, what kind of art you want to create for yourself.

I began stealing a lot of ideas from other directors I had worked with.

It is the life in literature that acts upon life.

Life imitates art -- but badly.

You have to be careful when it comes to copyrights, whether just sounding like or feeling like something is enough to say you violated their copyrights because there's a lot of music out there, and there's a lot of things that feel like other things that are influenced by other things. And you don't want to get into that thing where all of us are suing each other all the time because this and that song feels like another song.

Originality, I fear, is too often only undetected and frequently unconscious plagiarism.

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.