Clifton Fadiman Quotes

Next to the originator of a good sentence is the first quoter of it..

All this is labour which never meets the eye.... But too open and generous a revelation of the chapter and the page of the original quoted, has often proved detrimental to the legitimate honours of the quoter. They are unfairly appropriated by the next comer; the quoter is never quoted, but the authority he has afforded is produced by his successor with the air of an original research.

If you steal from one book you are condemned as a plagiarist, but if you steal from ten books you are considered a scholar, and if you steal from thirty or forty books, a distinguished scholar.

If you steal from one author it's plagiarism; if you steal from many it's research.

Whatever is well said by another, is mine.

No, generally I think influence is used as a nice word for plagiarism.

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

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

I got everything from someone. Nobody can be original.

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.

Originality is the art of concealing your source.

If you can't plagiarise yourself, who can you plagiarise?

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

One of the interesting things about quoting in an artwork is that there is a repeated confusion about who is speaking - one essentially becomes the author of a quote one uses.

Authors hide their big thefts by putting small ones between quotation marks.

The Plagiarism of orators is the art, or an ingenious and easy mode, which some adroitly employ to change, or disguise, all sorts of speeches of their own composition, or that of other authors, for their pleasure, or their utility; in such a manner that it becomes impossible even for the author himself to recognise his own work, his own genius, and his own style, so skilfully shall the whole be disguised.

Borrowed eloquence, if it contains as good stuff, is as good as own eloquence

plagiarism, n. A literary coincidence compounded of a discreditable priority and an honorable subsequence.

Most authors steal their works, or buy.

Everyone plagiarizes me. Ever since I wrote my autobiography.

When a thing has been said and well, have no scruple. Take it and copy it.

I don't read much of what I write because I worry about unintentionally borrowing something.

Originality is undetected plagiarism.

I, therefore, O Caesar, do not publish this work, merely prefixing my name to a treatise which of right belongs to others, nor think of acquiring reputation by finding fault with the works of any one.