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Suppose that every prospective parent in the world stopped having children naturally, and instead produced clones of themselves. What would the world be like in another 20 or 30 years? The answer is: much like today. Cloning would only copy the genetic aspects of people who are already here.
At the age of 12 I won the school prize for Best English Essay. The prize was a copy of Somerset Maugham's 'Introduction To Modern English And American Literature.' To this day I keep it on the shelf between my collection of Forester's works and the little urn that contains my mother's ashes.
Pay attention to them kids, don't let your feelings be hurt because they taking your place. They supposed to. But if you wanna stay around with them, you ain't got to copy 'em. Just get the ones that's real young, too young to even be copying yet, because you know they gonna be the next thing.
Microsoft has had two goals in the last 10 years. One was to copy the Mac, and the other was to copy Lotus' success in the spreadsheet - basically, the applications business. And over the course of the last 10 years, Microsoft accomplished both of those goals. And now they are completely lost.
So with the young African artists. What they have to learn from tribal art is not how to copy the traditional forms, but the confidence that comes from knowing that somewhere inside them there should be the vitality which enabled their fathers to produce these extraordinary and exciting forms.
At some point, I picked up an old library copy of 'To The Lighthouse' someone had bought for 25 cents. I began to read and didn't stop until the sun had blistered my back. A mysterious rightness, a beautiful submerged truth had invaded me, one that has ever since seemed slightly beyond my grasp.
I'm a big guy: I look like a linebacker, you know? But no one cares, really, that I'm educated. I have a copy of 'Fire Next Time' by James Baldwin in my bag. I have an Ibsen play in there, too. I have to walk through this world with that duality all the time, that I live in two different worlds.
I started off as a rapper from Thunder Bay, Ontario, believe it or not. There was a little group of 10 or 12 of us that would get together and copy each other's cassettes. So I was a rapper first, and it was that music that got me into this great entertainment world and got me out of Thunder Bay.
My whole relationship with Bowie started when I was 13, and I bought a copy of 'Aladdin Sane' when I didn't have a record player. I had this record for a year before I could play it, and it was the image - not the sound - that I was attracted to. I just saw this image and thought he was my cousin.
In the '50s and '60s, journalism wasn't a profession. It wasn't something you went to college for - it was really more of a trade. You had a lot of guys who came up working in newspapers at the copy desk, or delivery boys, and then they would somehow become reporters afterward and learn on the job.
In market research I did at Microsoft Corp. in the early 1990s, I estimated that the 'Wall Street Journal' took in about 75 cents per copy from subscribers, $1.25 at the newsstand and a whopping $5 per copy from ads. The ad revenue let them run a far bigger newsroom than subscribers were paying for.
You see, I'm also a futurist. I dream about the world 50, 100, maybe even 1,000 years in the future. But I also realize I'm probably not going to see it. However, I wouldn't mind having at least a copy of myself see the future, maybe 50, 100, 1,000 years into the future. It would be a fantastic ride.
Of course, to publish something, you have to write it, polish it, then hire out the line editing, copy editing and cover design. After which, you pick your way through the minefield of conforming to the differing requirements of Amazon, Barnes & Noble and Smashwords, or hire someone to do it for you.
Somebody had given me a copy of 'Hunky Dory,' which had yet to be a hit, although it was starting to percolate. I'd seen a couple of pictures of David, with his interesting hairdo and outfits, and I decided to seek him out, which wasn't difficult back then, as he was eager to do any kind of publicity.
When I hear people who love my music and are trying to copy it, it sounds strange to me because it sounds so simple, made by other people. It took me a lot of years to find the balance, to find a way to be on the edge of being accessible but at the same time having the echo of a deep, more complex world.
If your entire conception of what's possible in fantasy only comes from other fantasy books, you're going to go on to create a copy of a copy of a copy. There's nothing original there, nothing dynamic. Which is fine if that's your goal, but I've always wanted to do something no one else was doing before.
As a book editor, you need to pitch every one of your books again and again, dozens of times, for months on end. From a quick conversation with your boss or a letter that'll be read by just one person, to a five-minute speech in front of 50 colleagues or cover copy that'll be in front of millions of eyes.
In the spring of 2007, Israeli intelligence brought to Washington proof that the Assad regime in Syria was building a nuclear reactor along the Euphrates - with North Korean help. This reactor was a copy of the Yongbyon reactor the North Koreans had built, and was part of a Syrian nuclear weapons program.
When I was 11 or 12, I was really bored with everything on my summer reading list. It was all happy, middle-grade kinds of books. I was getting frustrated, because I liked to read. My mother went to the library and got me a copy of 'The Other Side of Midnight' by Sidney Sheldon. It was my first adult book.
I remember being a kid and seeing the 'National Inquirer' at the grocery store checkout line. When somebody actually picked up a copy, it was mortifying. You felt dirty for them. But now it's perfectly acceptable to read something like that. There's absolutely no taboo surrounding that kind of exploitation.
We got a copy of the 'New Statesman' at my grammar school in Wigton, Cumbria, in the 1950s. It sat mint fresh every week on the library table, with two or three other bargain-offer magazines. The 'Statesman' came out of the unimaginable Great World. I started to read it then and have pegged along ever since.
More than 30 years ago, in Washington, D.C., I secured a copy of a single by a Los Angeles band called The Bags. The two-song 7-inch, released on Dangerhouse, had a girl on the cover who looked right at you with huge eyes. The songs, 'Survive' and 'Babylonian Gorgon,' were great and made many of my mix tapes.
We buy a copy of 'Gravity's Rainbow,' say, and we carry our copy home. We open it; we fall into it. And it is here that the word 'copy' fails. Because what I experience when I read 'Gravity's Rainbow,' or 'Beloved,' or 'The Moviegoer,' is not at all a 'copy' of what you experience when you read the same novel.
The way I found time to write 'The Imperfectionists' was that I took work as a copy editor at the 'International Herald Tribune' in Paris, working full-time for approximately six months, then taking my savings from that and writing full-time, then returning after six months, and so on, until the book was done!
My college roommate gave me her copy of 'Lord of the Rings,' and I read that probably five or six times - not because I think it's the greatest thing ever written, though some people certainly think it is - but the world he creates is so vivid. So real that he designed its own languages, history and mythology.
If you look at the history of how information flows, there was a time that newspapers were kind of in the place that Google and Facebook are now - how do we get more people to buy a copy? Then there was a shift in the early 20th century. They needed to do better, and readers and consumers demanded that of them.
Van Morrison is probably, at this point in time, my biggest influence as a vocalist. When we were making our last album I had a vinyl copy of 'Veedon Fleece' in the vocal booth in front of me, in the dorky sense. I think there were candles around, which is really tacky, but hey, I needed to channel Van the Man!
From 1961 to 1964, I was fortunate enough to work at a think tank in the Kenwood neighborhood of Chicago. As a writer and editor, I reported in a publication about the thinkers. Our offices were in a former mansion; I worked in what had been the ballroom. As I sat typing my copy, I imagined the dancers waltzing.
At one point, I recognized that Warren Buffett, though he had every advantage in learning from Ben Graham, did not copy Ben Graham but, rather, set out on his own path and ran money his way, by his own rules... I also immediately internalized the idea that no school could teach someone how to be a great investor.
My first job out of college was as an editorial assistant in a New York publishing house. Being an editorial assistant is the purgatory would-be editors must endure before they can ascend the ladder and begin acquiring books on their own. I spent a year filing paperwork, writing copy, and typing rejection letters.
To copy Nature? A boy with a camera can do that. To get the spirit of Nature? A woodman or a shepherd can follow the trail of the whistling wind to hoarded sunshine in distant wolds. But to interpret Nature and inform it with a human personality that rises above it, invokes the divine in it, is the work of genius.
There are people who specialise in lettering, and I've had my hand lettering made into a digital font. I picked up a copy of the 'Dandy' the other week, and I was amazed to see that it was completely lettered in my hand-lettering font. It was quite a thrill, really, having been a 'Dandy' reader years and years ago.
One reason you should not use web applications to do your computing is that you lose control. It's just as bad as using a proprietary program. Do your own computing on your own computer with your copy of a freedom-respecting program. If you use a proprietary program or somebody else's web server, you're defenceless.
My dad, Bob Blum, used to dash across Grand Central's main terminal catwalk several times daily as a young CBS correspondent, running copy from newsroom to studio and back - because CBS' first broadcasts were from Grand Central Terminal. The pictures on people's television sets used to shake when the trains came in!
I was a crazy Pee-wee Herman fan when I was in my early teens. Before he had the kids' TV show, he had a nightclub show in L.A., and I had gotten a VHS copy of it. It was a kids' show, but onstage in a bar, so it's sort of poking fun at the kids' show. And I was obsessed with that, and then 'Pee-wee's Big Adventure.'
It is impossible to say when 37-year-old Benedict Arnold first met 18-year-old Peggy Shippen, but we do know that on September 25, 1778, he wrote her a love letter - much of it an exact copy of one he'd sent to another woman six months before. But if the overheated rhetoric was recycled, Arnold's passion was genuine.
Right from the 17th century, composers who have taken up music as their means of livelihood went through a hard time financially. They were paid only for commissioned works and public performances. And, when their music became famous, orchestras in other cities and countries would pay a small amount to copy the music.
I disagree with Apple on many things - such as its exclusive use of proprietary software and arbitrary restrictions on users seeking to copy, share, edit, and create software on their devices. However, I strongly feel that defending its users' and customers' right to strong encryption in court is incredibly important.
Now, many public libraries want to lend e-books, not simply to patrons who come in to download, but to anybody with a reading device, a library card and an Internet connection. In this new reality, the only incentive to buy, rather than borrow, an e-book is the fact that the lent copy vanishes after a couple of weeks.
When I was nine, I found a copy of 'Doctor Who: the Making of a Television Series' in the school library. It had a picture of Peter Davison on the front, and it was a formative book for me. It explained all the different departments like the script, cameras, and sets and explained how a television show is put together.
Many European countries, as well as Australia, Canada, Israel, and New Zealand, have adopted legislation that creates a 'public lending right', where the government recognises that enabling hundreds of people to read a single copy of a book provides a public good, but that doing so is likely to reduce sales of the book.
It is easy to understand why conflict is so often highlighted: Writers of headlines or promotional copy want to catch attention and attract an audience. They are usually under time pressure, which lures them to established, conventionalized ways of expressing ideas in the absence of leisure to think up entirely new ones.
Back in my pulp-mag days, I worked from about 8:30 to noon, took an hour off for lunch, and worked again from one to three, for a work day of five and a half hours or so. I wrote 20 to 30 pages of copy in that time, doing it all first draft, so that I was able to produce a short story of 5,000-7,500 words in a single day.
In the Sixties, there were no guidebooks to Asia, at least none that suited young shoestring travelers. No one on the hippie highway carried a copy of Fodor's 'Islamic Asia.' The route to spiritual enlightenment wasn't revealed in the pages of the latest Baedeker. Intrepids were on a journey of spontaneity and reinvention.
'Dead Poets Society' was a very influential film on me and so talking about that movie with him, he just inspired me to continue writing poetry and we talked a lot about our favourite poets. My wrap present from Robin was a beautiful limited edition copy of Walt Whitman's 'Leaves of Grass' and that's a great memory for me.
I treat my writing like a day job, like my main job, even if for many years I was doing other jobs to pay the bills. I worked as a copy editor. I was a medical guinea pig. I was an eBay power seller of ladies' handbags. I was an assistant to a bookie at the horse races. I bartended. I did anything I could to make ends meet.
The only thing I really recommend, if you're starting out in stand-up is to not try to copy anybody else. You can be influenced by people. I was influenced by Steve Martin and Bob Newhart and Woody Allen, but I never tried to be someone else. I always tried to be myself. And the reason people are successful is they're unique.
They go on about banning size zero, but I think Hollywood stars are the worst perpetrators. Most models are naturally long and gangly, while a lot of these young girls in Hollywood have gone on extreme diets. Their concave chests and bony arms are terrifying. It's scary to think that normal teenagers are tempted to copy them.
The more dollars the studio producers put in, the less freedom we have. If the budget hits $100m, they get scared - they'll take the existing score of a successful movie and expect composers to copy it, like wallpaper. The biggest challenge for any composer in Hollywood is to be as creative as possible within those boundaries.
I'm in love with artists that are really difficult to cover or to copy. You can only try to copy them, but you will never succeed because it's intertwined with really personal references and really personal ways to exist on stage. They are really strong individuals, and are writing their own songs and know where they want to go.