The fear of plagiarism can be a paralyzing thing and not to mention pointless. It’s like being afraid of the air you breathe. Of course I’m not talking about the word for word type, that’s a crime, but about the unconscious one, about those ideas that are in the air sometimes and they come to more people at once and about things going on around us that enter our subconscious. You can’t prevent being influenced by everything around you. We are all the unique combination of different influences. Lolita was a story told by an obscure German guy, but who cares about that. What matters is that Nabokov wrote it the way he did after absorbing countless influences, among which the story written by the German guy. The anxiety of influence can become the ecstasy of influence according to Jonathan Lethem and this amazing article, it’s just a matter of the manner in which you look at things.
And an ecstatic cover:
