Unoriginal Writing Quotes

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

I have read books that are so cliched and lazy, my eyes have bled. But I also have read books marketed under the chick-lit umbrella that are so honest, clever and gritty that I've wanted to give up writing and paint walls instead.

It has come to be practically a sort of rule in literature that a man, having once shown himself capable of original writing, is entitled thenceforth to steal from the writings of others at discretion.

Certainly, light fiction exists and encompasses mysteries or second-class romance novels, books that are read on the beach, whose only aim is to entertain. These books are not concerned with style or creativity - instead they are successful because they are repetitive and follow a template that readers enjoy.

A lot of times, especially with TV, I would get these scripts, and I'm like, 'Oh, they want me to be the good-looking guy who's a little bit of a rascal.' It's just boring.

The English may not always be the best writers in the world, but they are incomparably the best dull writers.

Plagiarism has been around far longer than the Internet. In fact, I had a poem published in 'Seventeen' magazine when I was 15 years old. About a year later I was informed that there was a girl who used that same poem to win a statewide poetry competition in Alabama. It took months for people to put together that this had happened.

There has been a lot of bad fantasy in the past - I'm by no means saying that all classic fantasy out there is bad - but there has been a lot of bad fantasy written by people who read a lot of fantasy and so all they keep doing is recycling it.

The majority of the books of our time give one the impression of having been manufactured in a day out of books read the day before.

Novels as dull as dishwater, with the grease of random sentiments floating on top.

Too many new writers dress up old cliches.

They lard their lean books with the fat of others work.

Sadly, for those who are busy sawing off their feet to escape the trap of cliches, every story is chock full of them and sometimes depends on an especially hoary one.

I hate dream sequences in movies and T.V. shows generally for their heavy-handed symbolism and storytelling tediousness.

Cliches and adjectives permeated my prose.

If there's anything I can't stand, it's the cliche of the female handler who's always talking through the radio with your player, telling you where to go and what to do with a sexy voice. It's such a horrible, horrible cliche. You just get so tired of it. It's like, is this all she's ever going to be?

Cliched characters are cliches because they're people being described by people who are on the outside. If you take two sentences from anybody and reduce them to just that, that's what you're going to get.

Our writers are full of cliches just as old barns are full of bats. There is obviously no rule about this, except that anything that you suspect of being a cliche undoubtedly is one and had better be removed.

Sometimes in television, if there are storylines that are oft-told, people can be hypercritical of them.

There are several occupational hazards for book reviewers, chief among them being the Curse of the Jaded Palate - that sinking feeling when you start reading a new book and begin to suspect that you've seen it all before.