I'm writing a story/novel/book. And there's happen to be a famous quote I saw in a movie and I use the quote in my story. Would this be called plagiarism?

For example : "Life is like a box of chocolate" in Forest Gump movie.

Now, how if I switch some words in the quote to make it different, would it still be called plagiarism?

For example : "Life is like a pack of candy"

Good question, I really don't know. I guess if it's different enough it should be ok.

That remind me, I've been really busy, I need to catch up on pms.

It's plagiarism when you cite the work of others without mentioning the source or use different wording to pass others' ideas off as your own.

In the example above, you'd be fine as most quasi-wisdoms and sayings of the type are more or less public property.
If you start quoting whole paragraphs or even the entire scene, that would be plagiarism. If you change the exact wording it might still be plagiarism, but it becomes easier to defend it as being a parody on a famous movie, which is allowed.

You could say, Life is like a Bag of Bertie Botts Beans!

Life's like a tub of jellyfishes. You never know when you're gonna get stung.

Thanks for the reply Legolas. At least now i can write my story in peace.

That was just an example fellas, not that I really want to type that particular forest gump quote. :rolleyes:

Well, in literature it's never plagiarism. It's intertextuality.

That is so going in my personal dictionary.

<font color=skyblue>There was a University girl up North (Harvard??) that wrote a book and it was highly sought after and praised by critics until somebody noted that a sentence she used in it was a bastardization of a sentence from another work. In her version, she switched the word order in a list around, and added one of her own words. This was enough to get her dropped from her publisher, expelled from the university and all that followed. </font>

Yeah, but she probably got real' famous anyway, right?