Quote of the Day: Bank robbery over plagiarism

I’d rather be caught holding up a bank than stealing so much as a two-word phrase from another writer. 

—Jack Smith

As you should be too. You might be able to beat the rap on the bank robbery charge, and then you’d be able to go right back to robbing banks, which is more lucrative than writing in most cases.

Get nabbed as a plagiarist and you could be out of business.

You might have to resort to robbing banks. I hear that’s where the money is. Since Quote of the Day has been a little less than daily in the last week because of some hiccups and potholes in my schedule, that can serve as a bonus second quote for today.

I linked Jack Smith’s name to the Wikipedia entry for the longtime Los Angeles Times columnist who died in 1996. I’m just assuming he’s the one who uttered or wrote that line. Smith was a fixture of the newspaper I grew up reading. His urbane, slice-of-life column was more my parents’ speed than mine, but he was a pretty famous guy in his time and place.