Roger Scruton Quotes

Authors from whom others steal should not complain, but rejoice. Where there is no game there are no poachers.

Well, you might as well imitate your own program because if you don't, someone else will.

Be careful that you do not write or paint anything that is not your own, that you don't know in your own soul.

You're creating new things in movies and people are going to steal them.

I think people who sample are cheating. It is like people who do collages. Use all of your own stuff.

In our day the conventional element in literature is elaborately disguised by a law of copyright pretending that every work of art is an invention distinctive enough to be patented.

People will steal ideas and put them into songs.

If I spend time conceiving and making a piece of art, and somebody else sees that it has market value and replicates it in order to steal part of my market, then that's not cool.

Never steal jokes.

There's a difference between hiring writers and stealing jokes.

Ten comics can say the same joke, and I'm the one who gets called a thief.

Student cartoonists as well as professionals should always be careful that they're not doing a cartoon that already has been done.

In L.A., anytime a show is a success, people come out of the woodwork claiming they had the idea first.

A lotta cats copy the Mona Lisa, but people still line up to see the original.

I do hear snippets on the radio. I do hear a little bit of me, sometimes great chunks of me. But I have to take that as a compliment; there's no way you can get sour grapes about that. But if somebody starts taking your whole new thing lock, stock, and barrel, and do their own version of it before you do it, that's not on.

I rather want my things to be copied than me copying. I would feel ashamed!

The last thing you want to do as a creator is take something of someone else's when you love him.

Am I allowed to ask my book / whether it's true I wrote it?

If a painting can be forged well enough to fool experts, why is the original so valuable?

Like in comedy, you know the names of the people who steal things that others work really hard on. It really sucks. And, in magic, it's not just the hard work of getting the words and attitude and point of view right; you're taking an actual invention, making something over three or four years, and somebody can just take it.

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.

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.

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

To copy is to invite disaster.

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