Ideas improve. The meaning of words participates in the improvement. Plagiarism is necessary. Progress implies it. It embraces an author’s phrase, makes use of his expressions, erases a false idea, and replaces it with the right idea. —  Guy Debord

A colleague recently shared the joyous “steal with pride” as a previous workplace mantra.  Likewise Austin Kleon’s “Steal Like An Artist” provides some unabashed guidance to scrupled plagiarism.  With quotables such as “You are a mashup”, and “everything is a remix, so steal like an artist,” it sings in the same key as these other luminaries of informed creative collage:

• Originality is undetected plagiarism. — William Ralph Inge
• Art is either plagiarism or revolution. — Paul Gauguin
• If you steal from one author it’s plagiarism; if you steal from many it’s research. —  Wilson Mizner
• No, generally I think influence is used as a nice word for plagiarism. —  Gilbert Gottfried

Here’s the almost-a-flicker-book trailer: