Don’t worry about too much stealing, because we’re all of us a gang of thieves, using an English language that we didn't make up out of whole cloth, phrases most of which have been used before, and ideas that fit into notions of “rightness” and/or “satisfaction” which are down to having read (and stolen) enough works by others that we’ve purloined entire concepts of story and character and style that countless other author/thieves have used before, not to mention all the stuff loaded into our baby brains by parents reading aloud “beginner's versions” of all these things. How many sentences by any writer don’t fit the basic pattern of “Look, Jane! See Spot run!”

The only real trick about writing is to paint over the original owner's signature cleverly enough that we don’t get caught at it, but the best writers admit their “inspirations,” which is a technical term of art very much like the perpetrators of Grand Theft, Auto rather like to call it “boosting,” as if the vehicles in question were thereby improved.

“Making all things new,” at least in fiction, means that no one can possibly understand it.

Here's a random string of brand new sentences "stolen" from a web application. I suspect that no one has ever used them in a story, and it’s fairly easy to see why.

You weren't surfing. I was laughing slowly. You were jogging fast.

Jessica was dancing.

It had too many words for a proper Haiku.(If it HAD BEEN a Haiku.)