: How much can I copy before it is considered plagiarism? How many words may I copy from someone's work before I have to begin paraphrasing it?

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Actually, nothing.

In non-fiction, as soon as you take anything from some other text – even your own! – you must enclose it in quotation marks, to show that it is a quotation, and give its source, even if you quote only a single word:

When Stuart (1963) speaks of a "raise", it is obvious that ...

In fiction, there are no clear conventions for this. There is the question of copyright infringement, of course, but there are literary genres – the essai (as practiced by Montaigne and not to be confused with the non-essaistic "essay" that pupils and students have to write), the pastiche, the collage (the Wikipedia article does not properly define literary collage, which is a collage of text) – whose very essence is the integration of "found" texts into a new work, usually without explicit quotations markers.

Here is a quick made up example of a literary collage. None of the words are original to me, and – while I'm making no claims as to this example's literary merit – yet you could argue that the unique and creative combination of the quotations establish a new and original work in its own right:

In the beginning God created miles to go before I sleep.

What is also common is the use of poems, song lyrics, advertising slogans and other textual artifacts from the environment of the character, similar to the use of existing places or persons:

After shaking President Obama's ["quoting" a person] hand, Paul walked out from the Oval Office ["quoting" a place], singing: "Please allow me to introduce myself, I'm a man of wealth and fame." [quoting song lyrics]

In fictional literature, from a collage to a novel featuring a character speaking a line from a Walt Witman poem, the effect of the quotation comes from the reader's familiarity with the original. We all know President Obama, the Oval Office and the Rolling Stones' "Sympathy for the Devil". If we didn't, that writing wouldn't work. And it is this familiarity, that makes marking the quotations unneccessary.

A good example is William Faulkner's novel The Sound and the Fury. Only if you know where the phrase "the sound and the fury" comes from, will it make sense to you. You can certainly enjoy the book without that understanding, but understanding it will add an additional layer of meaning to it, and it is this meaning that is the purpose of that title (which is an unmarked quotation).

In fiction, from a literary perspective, it is perfectly acceptable to include even lengthy quotes without marking them up as such. Wether or not you will infringe on someone's copyright by doing so, is a legal question outside the scope of your question. And wether or not that quotation enhances or detracts from your work is a different question entirely.