A Simpleton a Story of the Day
Book Description
It lias lately been objected to me, in stndiously courteous terms of course, that I borrow from other books, and am a plagiarist. To tbis I reply tbat I borrow facts from every accessible soui ce, and am not a plagiarist. The plagiarist is one who borrows from a homogeneous work: for such a man borrows not ideas only, but their treatment. He who borrows only from heterogeneous works is not a plagi...
MoreIt lias lately been objected to me, in stndiously courteous terms of course, that I borrow from other books, and am a plagiarist. To tbis I reply tbat I borrow facts from every accessible soui ce, and am not a plagiarist. The plagiarist is one who borrows from a homogeneous work: for such a man borrows not ideas only, but their treatment. He who borrows only from heterogeneous works is not a plagiarist. All fiction, worth a button, is founded on facts; and it does not matter one straw whether the facts are taken from personal experience, hearsay, or printed books ;only those books must not be works of fiction. Ask your common sense why a man writes better fiction at forty than he can at twenty. It is simply because he has gathered more facts from each of these three sources, experience, hearsay, print. To those who have science enough to appreciate the above distinction, I am very willing to admit that in all my tales I use a vast deal of heterogeneous material, which in a life of study I have gathered from men, journals, blue-books, histories, biographies, law reports, etc.
(Typographical errors above are due to OCR software and don't occur in the book.)
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