Lin-Manuel Miranda Quotes

I have an unconscious burglar living in my mind: If I read something, it's mine. I can read Middle English stories, Geoffrey Chaucer or Sir Thomas Malory, but once I start moving in the direction of contemporary fantasy, my mind begins to take over.

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.

Once you get into the world of dystopia, it's hard to avoid plagiarism, because other people have had such powerful visions.

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

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

Most books today seemed to have been written overnight from books read the day before.

I'm a plagiarist - I always look back at other movies, and I steal, but I steal well, and I reinvent.

All writers are magpies, right? We're always stealing bits from different places and then weaving them into our little nest.

I won't lie, I stole a lot of ideas from Giampaolo.

Plagiarism is basic to all culture

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

I have myself always been terrified of plagiarism - of being accused of it, that is. Every writer is a thief, though some of us are more clever than others at disguising our robberies. The reason writers are such slow readers is that we are ceaselessly searching for things we can steal and then pass off as our own: a natty bit of syntax, a seamless transition, a metaphor that jumps to its target like an arrow shot from an aluminum crossbow.

I'm not reading currently because I'm getting revisions of a novel. If I read while I'm writing I will unconsciously plagiarize and go to jail.

There is no less invention in aptly applying a thought found in a book, than in being the first author of the thought.

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

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

When it comes to other people's writing, my older influences are more powerful than more recent ones, partially because I'm now more worried that I'll suddenly accidentally steal something from another writer.

I steal from every movie ever made.

About the most originality that any writer can hope to achieve honestly is to steal with good judgment.

If you do come up with a new idea, in 4 seconds it will belong to somebody else.

I do know there's a lot of music where Led Zeppelin has been leant on. We didn't do anything about it. And I wouldn't want to, either.

It's so funny, I'm always stealing from Moliere, and nobody ever notices. I steal from him willy-nilly.

I don't know where the ideas come from, and it's terrifying. They seem to be absolute flukes. When I was in my 20s, I'd walk around with a notebook all the time and make sure I wrote down anything that occurred to me. Now I'm just hoping that some sort of event will descend on me.

In many senses, creativity and 'plagiarism' are nearly indivisible.

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.