Literary Appropriation Quotes

Every writer from Montaigne to William S. Burroughs has pasted and cut from previous work. Every artist, whether it's Warhol or, you know, Dangermouse or whoever.

It doesn't seem Shakespeare works if you turn him into a religion.

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

Literary works cannot be taken over like factories, or literary forms of expression like industrial methods. Realist writing, of which history offers many widely varying examples, is likewise conditioned by the question of how, when and for what class it is made use of.

[Science fiction is] out in the mainstream now. You can tell by the way mainstream literary authors pillage SF while denying they're writing it!

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

I am suspicious of writers who say their work is original and influenced by nobody. If it is, it is probably uninteresting. The biggest source of novels is other novels.

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

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

I never admit to wishing I'd written something by another author, but if my name mysteriously appeared on the title page of 'The Guns of August,' I wouldn't complain.

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

Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.

All my early books are written as if I were Indian. In England, I had started writing as if I were English; now I write as if I were American. You take other people's backgrounds and characters; Keats called it negative capability.

He invades authors like a monarch; and what would be theft in other poets is only victory in him.

Most authors steal their works, or buy.

The ideas I stand for are not mine. I borrowed them from Socrates. I swiped them from Chesterfield. I stole them from Jesus. And I put them in a book.

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.

Dickens is one of those authors who are well worth stealing.

There's a lot of thievery involved in writing. You're breaking into other people's spaces and other people's stories.

All writers steal. You might as well steal from the best.

I've often described my book 'Anno Dracula' as 'literally, a vampire novel' - in that it battens on to other novels and sucks their lifeblood, transforming as well as feeding off them.