Receiving the invitation to write with Paul was very exciting, but not without its anxieties. I had always tried to be ingenious when borrowing ideas from Lennon and McCartney, but sometimes it’s a thin line between influence and larceny.
Plagiarism Quotes
I know one thing – that a certain amount of pride always goes along with a teaspoonful of brains, and that this pride protects a man from deliberately stealing other people’s ideas. That is what a teaspoonful of brains will do for a man – and admirers had often told me I had nearly a […]
I hate the situation of the plagiarist; the glass I drink from is not large, but at least it is my own.
The kernel, the soul – let us go further and say the substance, the bulk, the actual and valuable material of all human utterances – is plagiarism.
I don’t like composers who think. It gets in the way of their plagiarism.
A grown person’s memory-tablet is as a palm, with hardly a bare space upon which to engrave a phrase.
Damn those who have said what we wanted to say!
Substantially all ideas are second-hand, consciously and unconsciously drawn from a million outside sources, and daily used by the garnerer with a pride and satisfaction born of the superstition that he originated them; whereas there is not a rag of originality about them anywhere except the little discoloration they get from his mental and moral […]
When a thing has been said and well said, have no scruple; take it and copy it.
It takes a thousand men to invent a telegraph, or a steam engine, or a phonograph, or a photograph, or a telephone, or any other Important thing – and the last man gets the credit and we forget the others. He added his little mite – that is all he did.
