Crediting Quotes

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.

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

Next to the originator of a good sentence is the first quoter of it. Many will read the book before one thinks of quoting a passage. As soon as he has done this, that line will be quoted east and west.

There's a lot of people I take stuff from, and it's mostly bad guys in movies.

Half the lobbyists in this town claim credit for the sunrise at least once a week.

People are always giving you credit for really wanting to say more than you said.

People writing about me have said that I've influenced a lot of people, and there are some artists who have credited me with influencing them.

I believe that comedians do what they do, and then they get credit or criticism for doing it. There's nothing planned about this.

If you must write prose or poems, the words you use should be your own. Don't plagiarize or take 'on loan'. There's always someone, somewhere, with a big nose, who knows, who'll trip you up and laugh when you fall.

Next to doing things that deserve to be written, nothing gets a man more credit, or gives him more pleasure than to write things that deserve to be read.

For the doubters out there, of course I was going to have help from Penguin's editorial team in telling my story, which I talked about from the beginning.

The worst thing in the world that can happen to you if you're an engineer that has given his life to something is for someone to rip it off and put their name to it.

We prefer to think that the absence of inverted commas guarantees the originality of a thought, whereas it may be merely that the utterer has forgotten its source.

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.

I think smart aggregation is a service to readers. And we do it, too ... . Whether it's a politics page and you want Dan Balz to tell you what is he reading, what does he think are the smartest articles today on the elections or the primaries. So, I think aggregation is great ... . So I'm all for aggregation. And the more eyeballs we can get to our content, the better. We do want readers to be educated and to understand the difference between, what is a source that you can trust as opposed to just rumors out there. And the difference between just repurposing content and not crediting it.

Everyone plagiarizes me. Ever since I wrote my autobiography.

I've seen it in so many talented young women who hold back because they're not sure that what they say will be smart enough. Or maybe they've said something in a prior meeting, and people acted like they hadn't said it, and that was crushing. Then we have all had the experience where 20 minutes later, a man says the same thing and everybody responds positively.... So don't take it personally. Take it seriously so that you understand it, and then try to devise techniques to overcome it.

Attribution is power.

Have you ever observed that we pay much more attention to a wise passage when it is quoted than when we read it in the original author?

I always chose the byline.

What I didn't do was pick one thing and keep saying it over and over again, so I could have gotten credit for it.

A publisher should always be on the receiving end. He should take an interest in almost any subject and remain anonymous, letting the author take center stage.