What are your thoughts on sampling from other songs? (I’m talking more instruments and not someone talking)
Personally I’m a bit torn. I want everything I make to be mine but there are just some things you can’t recreate. Also it can add some cultural flare and that kind of stuff.
People been doing it for years 
everything you do is not ‘yours’ anyway. everything you think, say, make, do, etc is influenced by everything you see, hear, feel, smell and even more senses so don’t worry about stuff like that and make music
It depends on how you look at music really. I kind of see everything under the sun as being available and ripe for the taking and reappropriating, but one also should be sensible. Sampling a melody from Aphex Twin’s Avril 14, for example, and using it verbatim, i.e. Kanye’s Blame Game, is, just IMO, less creative than sampling, say, Billy Joel’s Just the Way You Are and reworking it into something entirely different, i.e. High Fidelity by Daft Punk.
I guess that’s kind of how I see it. I’ve just been debating finding a good sample of some instrumental Chinese strings and cutting it up and re arranging it potentially. This thread has made me feel less guilty.