I am a free man. I do not need to copy Petrarca or Boccaccio. My own genius is enough. Let others worry themselves about style, and so cease to be themselves. Without a master, without a model, without a guide, I go to work and earn my living, my well-being and my fame.
Copy
The difference between a bad artist and a good one is: the bad artist seems to copy a great deal; the good one really does.
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.
Traditional copyright has been that you can’t make a full copy of somebody’s work without their permission.
Perhaps you could sympathize with those who seek to replace a dead child with a copy, or to copy a parent or a relative or even a celebrity.
The media only wants to get the view of the flaming radicals because they make better copy than those of us who are more sensible. I’m a feminist and I think I’ve done a lot of good.
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.
My father, whose hobby was collecting secondhand cricket books, came back from a book fair one day with a copy of ‘The Body In The Library.’
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.
When a writer tries to copy another writer, it’s doomed to fail.