Jonathan Lethem's "The Ecstasy of Influence"

The text isn't so much an excuse for plagiarism or telling you to pass someone else's work off as your own as it is a statement that everything is borrowed from somewhere, whether intentionally or not, and that that is the beauty of writing. More readers nowadays should be more forgiving of writing that seems too similar to another's because it's very difficult, if not impossible, to come up with a totally original thought. It's a tricky subject because the sharing of ideas among writers is something to be celebrated but you hate to see someone profiting off of someone else's work without giving them credit. If one writer comes up with a thought and another one comes along and packages it better and makes it famous, the first writer probably would feel cheated but the second writer probably wouldn't feel like they did anything wrong. Of course, it's hard to say if the idea really belonged to that first writer to begin with. But in a way that's what makes the sharing of ideas so interesting because thoughts get passed around and everyone that hears/reads them can interpret them differently and use them to different ends. That is the ecstasy of influence that Lethem is talking about. The danger comes when someone hears a thought and doesn't add their own influence it or take something away from it and reuses it for the same purpose as the person they got it from, because then there is nothing unique about what they are writing.