Q:There are a few Tumblr users making a fuss about the "my thoughts are stars I can't fathom into constellations" quote being plagerised from Elias Canetti. Did you? Copyright laws confuse me.

jrrtolkien-deactivated20130203

I have never read Elias Canetti, but after some googling, it seems like the Canetti quote is, “His head is made of stars, but not yet arranged into constellations.” (This is presumably a translation from German, so I can’t speak to the exact quote.)

That’s a great line, but it’s about something entirely different. I assume it’s about the intellectual experience of adolescence, whereas Augustus’s line in The Fault in Our Stars is about illness and fatigue and not being able to express himself as clearly as he wants to.

Neither Elias Canetti nor myself thought up the idea that constellations are a way of constructing meaning and organization from a disorganized and arbitrary universe. I’m sure neither of us is the first to use that idea in fiction, either. Anyone who claims their fiction is wholly original is lying, but this is not plagiarism. It’s two similar-but-not-at-all-identical things arising independently, as happens all the time in writing (and elsewhere).

For example: another line from the The Fault in Our Stars is, “I fell in love the way you fall asleep: slowly, then all at once.” This is similar to a line from The Sun Also Rises in which a character is asked how he went bankrupt and answers, “Two ways: Gradually and then suddenly.” This line I actually have read and was conscious of when I wrote the line in TFiOS, but it still isn’t plagiarism. Nor is it plagiarism when I wrote “So it goes” in TFiOS even though Slaughterhouse Five made that sentence famous.

Calling a writer a plagiarist is a very serious accusation, so I want to be very clear: I have never plagiarized.

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