To remember that I used to like avocados with a touch of walnut oil only adds to my shame. - Mark Forsyth

So Shakespeare stole; but he did wonderful things with his plunder. He's like somebody who nicks your old socks and then darns them.

if authors were to let a trifling thing like ignorance stop them from writing, the bookshops would be empty.

Tolstoy, Stendhal and Cervantes, these men follow me around. They stand in dark corners and eye me disapprovingly from beneath supercilious eyebrows. And all because I’ve never got round to reading their blasted, thousand-page, three-ton, five-generation, state-of-a-nation thingummywhatsits. I don’t care. Or rather, sometimes I do, and at other times I remember that I’m a tortoise-slow reader and that there’s a pub just around the corner.