Quoting other authors...

freeman801 said:

My MC is lied up in bed, and his friend is reading him a story out of an H.P. Lovecraft book. There is a passage I want to use in the book that would go well with what was going on in his life. Can I write this? Can you get in trouble if it does get published and there are two sentences from some other book? But you give credit where credit is due, of course?

Click to expand...

So long as you give credit you should be all right. I think Lovecraft might have been around long enough by now that it's public use, but you can check on that. You should be all right because it's a character reading a book to another, not you stealing the lines and using them for your own writing, so it'll be understood by everyone that you didn't write that yourself and aren't pretending to have.

If it is copyrighted material then you need the owner's permission to use their words. Just giving credit is not enough; explicit permission is needed, and usually a fee is involved for which the author is responsible.

There are a number of threads here on AW that discuss fair use and what can be used of another's copyrighted material. If you go into the search function ("Search") on the blue bar at the top of the screen just to the left of your user name and PMs, click on advanced. Then do a search for fair use, searching thread titles.

You will pull up threads where people have discussed copyright and fair use.

~suki

freeman801 said:

My MC is lied up in bed, and his friend is reading him a story out of an H.P. Lovecraft book. There is a passage I want to use in the book that would go well with what was going on in his life. Can I write this? Can you get in trouble if it does get published and there are two sentences from some other book? But you give credit where credit is due, of course?

Click to expand...

I think Lovecraft's in the public domain but you normally give acknowledgement on the page of the book where it says the publishing date and the fact that the book complies with copyright acts.

I don't think two sentences out of a whole book could get anyone in trouble. Two sentences out of a haiku, yes!