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: