"Good artists borrow, great artists steal."
—Unknown, attributed to Pablo Picasso
"If you copy from one author, it's plagiarism; if you copy from many, it's research."
—Wilson Mizner
"I don’t worry about originality, a word our countrymen use to describe novelty. But Capote was unusually derivative. We used to play a game with Capote’s work. We’d read a passage from A Tree of Night or Other Voices, Other Rooms and then try to find whom he had stolen it from. Carson McCullers was his principal quarry, but he did very well with Eudora Welty. I even found scenes from old Warner Bros. movies that he had lifted. He was ruthlessly unoriginal."
—Gore Vidal on Truman Capote
"Tarantino sometimes talks about how he stole the 'Sicilians were spawned by n***rs' speech in True Romance (which he describes as one of his finest moments) from a guy who just thought he was having a conversation with his buddy Quentin, and it gets a bit weird. Then you find out that he cribbed Sam Jackson's 'lay my vengeance' speech in Pulp Fiction from an old Sonny Chiba movie, and you start to get suspicious...God, can you imagine talking to this guy? Like, as a person? Would you spend the whole time worried that if you said something clever it would show up in one of his movies and film students would cream themselves over it?"
"I was this close to starting my own little enterprise, man. But enter another software engineer. Not so young, not so bright, but very very sneaky. Ed Dillinger. So one night, our boy Flynn, he goes to his terminal, tries to read up his file. I get nothing on there, it's a big blank. Okay, now we take you three months later. Dillinger presents ENCOM with five video games, that's he's invented. The slime didn't even change the names, man! He gets a big, fat promotion. And thus begins his meteoric rise to... what is he now, Executive V.P.?"
—Kevin Flynn, TRON
I listen to your demo tape and act like I don't like it
Six months later you hear your lyrics on my shit
People don't buy shit no more, they just dub it
That's why I'm still broke and had the number one club hit
Six months later you hear your lyrics on my shit
People don't buy shit no more, they just dub it
That's why I'm still broke and had the number one club hit
—Eminem, "I'm Shady"
You say : "'Ere long done do does did"
Words which could only be your own
And then produce the text
From whence was ripped
(Some dizzy whore, 1804)
Words which could only be your own
And then produce the text
From whence was ripped
(Some dizzy whore, 1804)
—The Smiths, "Cemetry Gates"
Creative people have trouble recognising their skills as skills, because eventually they feel like second nature, and they don't feel real or practical […]. But it turns out, this stuff really is valuable. If it wasn’t, people wouldn’t be stealing it. Creativity doesn’t feel special or unique until you realise people have to plagiarise it.
