Jorge Luis Borges had a generous view of plagiarism, or at least of a particular kind of it. The author of 'The Library of Babel' liked to say that ideas travel from one writer to another as a matter of course. What interested him was what happened after the handoff: the receiving writer could take what had arrived and make it better. He saw no shame in borrowing a plot, a structure or an image, provided the borrowed material got reworked into something stronger. Originality, in his mind, counted for less than quality, and literature moved forward through these chains of inheritance. He often pointed out that the great classics carry echoes of earlier texts, and that pretending otherwise amounted to false modesty. His stance sits awkwardly beside the usual complaints about copying, because he treated the practice as part of the trade rather than a crime. The phrase about his generous idea captures the spirit: give the borrowed material back improved, and the debt is settled.