“Every book is a quotation; and every house is a quotation out of all forests and mines and stone quarries; and every man is a quotation from all his ancestors.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

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“Don’t let anyone say there aren’t magic words.”

Siri Hustvedt

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“Notewise, whenever I read a passage that moves me, I transcribe it in my diary, hoping my fingers might learn what excellence feels like.”

David Sedaris

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“The originality which we ask from the artist is originality of treatment, not of subject. It is only the unimaginative who ever invent. The true artist is known by the use he makes of what he annexes, and he annexes everything.”

Oscar Wilde

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“Off I go, rummaging about in books for sayings which please me.”

Michel de Montaigne

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“Originally, feathers evolved to retain heat; later, they were repurposed for a means of flight. No one ever accuses the descendants of ancient birds of plagiarism for taking heat-retaining feathers and modifying them into wings for flight. In our current system, the original feathers would be copyrighted, and upstart birds would get sued for stealing the feathers for a different use. Almost all famous discoveries (by Edison, Darwin, Einstein, et al.) were not lightning-bolt epiphanies but were built slowly over time and heavily dependent on the intellectual superstructure of what had come before them. The commonplace book was popular among English intellectuals in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. These notebooks were a depository for thoughts and quotes and were usually categorized by topic. Enquire Within Upon Everything was a commercially successful take-off on the commonplace book in London in 1890. There’s no such thing as originality. Invention and innovation grow out of rich networks of people and ideas. All life on earth (and by extension, technology) is built upon appropriation and reuse of the preexisting.”

David Shields

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“I am very influenced by the people who influenced my influences, and I am influenced even more by the people who influenced them.”

M. Ward

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“I think I get so in love with a band that I just end up pretty much copying them. And I hope that the originality can come from the fact that you’re in love with 1,000 bands and they’re all completely different. So that when you copy all of them at once, that’s how you create something new.”

Jack Steadman

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“It was you that broke the new wood
Now is the time for carving.”

Ezra Pound

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“Other people’s words are the bridge you use to cross from where you were to wherever you’re going.”

Zadie Smith

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“What people don’t understand is that musicians swim backwards up the stream. You have what you like and then you want to see where it came from.”

Marc Ribot

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“Quotation is something that happens a lot in the music world. Merle Haggard can mimic Johnny Cash and Willie Nelson perfectly. The Beatles, in ‘Back in the USSR,’ mimic The Beach Boys. Quotation is a phrase that is used all the time in jazz solos. It happens a lot in old-time string band music too. One song is always using a line from another song to brace it. But then goes off on another tangent. Minstrels did it all the time. Weird takes on Shakespeare plays, stuff like that. It’s just done automatically.”

Bob Dylan

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