evidence: Here’s an example from my own work. In my book All the Words, I write about a visit to the Dickens Museum in London. Posted on the wall near Dickens’s writing desk is a prominent quotation: "Happiness is a gift and the trick is not to expect it but to delight in it when it comes." I snapped a photo of it and used it in my blog post about the visit, thinking that it was a wonderful metaphor for the writing process too. All we can do is sit down, again and again, to the blank page and try to get the words out. Sometimes they’ll just be regular old words, but every once in a while you’ll be able to tap into a magical vein of inspiration. When I sat down to turn that collection of blog posts into a book, I tried to find which of Dickens’s novels this was from, only to discover they aren’t Dickens’s words at all: They are taken from the 2002 film adaptation of Nicholas Nickleby. Despite blogger Sue Brewton’s valiant efforts to stamp out this strain of what she calls the "quote virus", it continues to proliferate, especially on the kind of quote collection websites that make a fact-checker’s job so difficult.