Quotes & Sayings About Copies

I wish to try my hand at a novel," he said. "Just scribbling, I assure you, but it strikes me as such a noble art, requiring none of the monetary resources of opera or drama, nor the erudition of poetry. Perchance a publisher could be found. I'd be satisfied by the printing of even a score of copies, if only to hold the bound work in my hands. It gives a unique satisfaction, I assume, the writing of a novel. — Kyle Muntz

Last month we had to sit through a presentation on eliminating redundancy, and it was a bunch of Power Point slides, plus a guy reading out what was on the slides, and then he gave us all hard copies. I don't understand these things. — Max Barry

I read somewhere that the New Orleans citizenry bought fewer copies of the New York Times than any other city in the United States, although they made up for it by buying more formal wear than anywhere else. If you're going out to formal dinners every evening, you don't get much time to read the New York Times. — John Connolly

Be yourself, because an original is better than a copy. — Greyson Chance

Learn from everyone, copy no one. — Don Shula

Let's set the existence-of-God issue aside for a later volume, and just stipulate that in some way, self-replicating organisms came into existence on this planet and immediately began trying to get rid of each other, either by spamming their environments with rough copies of themselves, or by more direct means which hardly need to be belabored. Most of them failed, and their genetic legacy was erased from the universe forever, but a few found some way to survive and to propagate. — Neal Stephenson

If you're going to write a book that might, in its very best accidental career, sell 30,000 copies, you've got to have a day job. — Padgett Powell

Today there survives more than 25,0000 partial and complete, ancient handwritten manuscript copies of the New Testament. These hand written manuscripts have allowed scholars and textual critics to go back and verify that the Bible we have in our possession today is the same Bible that the early church possessed 2,000 years ago. — Charlie Campbell

When other girls had tea parties on the playground, I brought out my secondhand Ouija board and attempted to raise the dead. While my classmates gave book reports on The Wind In The Willows or Charlotte's Web, I did mine on tattered, paperback copies of Stephen King novels that I'd borrowed from my grandmother. Instead of Sweet Valley High, I read books about zombies and vampires. Eventually, my third grade teacher called my mother in to discuss her growing concerns over my behavior, and my mom nodded blithely, but failed to see what the problem was. When Mrs. Johnson handed her my recent book report on Pet Sematary,, my mom wrinkled her forehead with concern and disapproval. "Oh, I see,"she said disappointingly, as she turned to me. "You spelled 'cemetery' wrong." Then I explained that Stephen King had spelled it that way on purpose, and she nodded, saying, "Ah. Well, good enough for me. — Jenny Lawson

Take notes. Everything is copy. — Nora Ephron

In 1872, Western Union (by then the dominant telegraph company in the United States) decided to implement a new, secure scheme to enable sums of up to $100 to be transferred between several hundred towns by telegraph. The system worked by dividing the company's network into twenty districts, each of which had its own superintendent. A telegram from the sender's office to the district superintendent confirmed that the money had been deposited; the superintendent would then send another telegram to the recipient's office authorizing the payment. Both of these messages used a code based on numbered codebooks. Each telegraph office had one of these books, with pages containing hundreds of words. But the numbers next to these words varied from office to office; only the district superintendent had copies of each office's uniquely numbered book. — Tom Standage

When something original works, then everyone wants to copy it. But if you're trying to do something that no one's ever seen before it's frightening. — Chris Carter

How strange to remember typewriters, with their jammed keys and snarled ribbons and the smudgy carbon paper for copies. — Margaret Atwood

I looked back at some of my earlier published stories with genuine horror and remorse. I got thinking, How many extant copies might there be, who owns them, and do they keep their doors locked? — Richard Russo

I guess you don't want to leave copies of Genocide Illustrated out for the UPS guy to see.) — Tad Williams

I think intellectual property is more like land, and copyright violation is more like trespass. Even though you don't take anything away from the landowner when you trespass, most people understand and respect the laws that make it illegal. The real crime in copyright violation is not the making of the copies, it's the expropriation of the creator's right to control the creation. — Brad Templeton

copies were passed to the cryptanalysts, who sat in little kiosks, ready to tease out the meanings of the messages. As well as supplying the emperors of Austria with invaluable intelligence, the Viennese Black Chamber sold the information it harvested to other powers in Europe. In 1774 an — Simon Singh

I'm never going to complain about receiving free early copies of books, because clearly there's nothing to complain about, but it does introduce a rogue element into one's otherwise carefully plotted reading schedule ...
Being a reader is sort of like being president, except reading involves fewer state dinners, usually. You have this agenda you want to get through, but you get distracted by life events, e.g., books arriving in the mail/World War III, and you are temporarly deflected from your chosen path. — Nick Hornby

Even in the former Soviet Union, they have good copies of my movies. — Dario Argento

Of those of us who comprise the real clan of the book, who read not to judge the reading of others but to take the measure of ourselves. Of those of us who read because we love it more than anything, who feel about bookstores the way some people feel about jewelers. The silence about this was odd, both because there are so many of us and because we are what the world of books is really about. We are the people who once waited for the newest installment of Dickens's latest novel and who kept battered copies of Catcher in the Rye in our back pockets and backpacks. We are the ones who saw to it that Pride and Prejudice never went out of print. — Anna Quindlen

Not only must we move forward in a monumental manner more copies of the Book of Mormon, but we must move boldly forward into our own lives and throughout the earth more of its marvelous messages. — Ezra Taft Benson

I don't keep any copies of my books in the house - they go to my mum's flat. I don't like them around. — Zadie Smith

The committees scour the bookstores, printing and publishing houses, paying particular attention to secondhand bookstores. There, they requisition countless copies of 'Incautious Maidens' or 'Flames at the Metropole.' So that those who prefer the false view of the world presented in cheap novels will never find refuge again. — Mariusz Szczygiel

Darwin's great gift to science was simplifying all life to pure mathematics: your one and only goal on earth is multiplication. Everything you do, every instinct you have, is an evolutionary urge to make babies and leave behind as many copies of yourself as possible. From that perspective, heroism makes no sense. Why risk the grave for someone else if there's no guarantee of a biological payoff? Dying for your own kids: smart. Dying for a rival's? Genetic suicide. — Christopher McDougall

Yves Saint Laurent is a young man of excellent taste; the more he copies me the more taste he displays. — Coco Chanel

I buy a lot of cookbooks. Some of them you just kind of read, and you try one recipe, and it doesn't really work. So then you don't go back to it. The new Ina Garten cookbook, which is called 'Back to Basics,' I have not had a failure with. It is the most fantastic cookbook. I think I bought 20 copies of it for friends. — Nora Ephron

I have never read anything quite like Mark Haddon's funny and agonizingly honest book, or encountered a narrator more vivid and memorable. I advise you to buy two copies; you won't want to lend yours out. — Arthur Golden

The masses are only to be regarded as one of three things: either as copies of great personalities, bad copies, clumsily produced in a poor material, or as foils to the great, or finally as their tools — Georg Brandes

Copyright law has got to give up its obsession with 'the copy.' The law should not regulate 'copies' or 'modern reproductions' on their own. It should instead regulate uses
like public distributions of copies of copyrighted work
that connect directly to the economic incentive copyright law was intended to foster. — Lawrence Lessig

Love does not need true copies signed by a registrar of marriages. — Nilesh Rathod

I consider the law prohibiting the sharing of copies with your friend the moral equivalent of Jim Crow. It does not deserve respect. — Richard M. Stallman

We watch our competitors, learn from them, see the things that they were doing for customers and copy those things as much as we can. — Jeff Bezos

Instead of getting my gold retirement watch and landing on my feet with a white picket fence and a satellite dish, I ended up base-jumping from the kettle into the fire. All because of one last job. But what's done is done. If your interested, you can read about the whole hot mess in The Intern's Handbook. You won't find it at Barnes & Noble, but I hear the feds have a few copies lying around, and I wouldn't be surprised if you could download it for free on Russian iTunes. I'm told it's an excellent beach/airplane/bathroom/killing-time-after-a-motel-tryst read. — Shane Kuhn

As man, as beast, as an ephemeral fly begets, Godhead begets Godhead,
For things below are copies, the Great Smaragdine Tablet said.
Yet all must copy copies, all increase their kind ... — William Butler Yeats

Only God creates. The rest of us just copy. — Michelangelo

I have been told by hospital authorities that more copies of my works are left behind by departing patients than those of any other author. — Robert Benchley

When you're working on a game that has a budget of tens of millions of dollars and you have to sell millions and millions and millions of copies to break even, you have a lot more layers between you and the audience. You have a marketing department, and there's a different marketing department for every continent, and the parent company has stockholders, and all that kind of stuff. — Steve Gaynor

While never ultimately commercially successful, the Dreamcast is home to the most expensive-to-produce games made to date. Shenmue and Shenmue 2 cost more than $70 million at the time; Sega would have needed to sell two copies of each game for each Dreamcast — Sam Pettus

People still love browsing book stores, and there is an element of passion in collecting DVDs; however, it seems unlikely that the desire to collect boxes or a preference for physical artwork over thumbnails are strong enough forces to hold back the convenience (and, arguably, inevitability) of digital copies. — Jeff Ulin

I am not interested in being a role model, or in fulfilling the expectations of others. I know I am of most use to others and to myself by being this unique self: Nature, I have noticed, is not particularly devoted to copies, and human beings needn't be either. — Alice Walker

My father says that there is only one perfect view - the view of the sky straight over our heads, and that all these views on earth are but bungled copies of it. — E. M. Forster

Possession of books denounced as heretical was made a criminal offense. Copies of such books were burned and destroyed. But in Upper Egypt, someone, possibly a monk from a nearby monastery of St Pachomius, took the banned books and hid them from destruction - in the jar where they remained buried for almost 1,600 years. — Elaine Pagels

When Jack Swagger copies my Ankle Lock and Randy Orton does my Angle Slam, it's disrespectful. I didn't come up with the Ankle Lock; Ken Shamrock came up with the Ankle Lock, but I waited until he retired to do the Ankle Lock. — Kurt Angle

Our first record, 'Huey Lewis And The News', was seen by no one - it sold 25 copies. — Huey Lewis

If an innovative piece of software comes along, Microsoft copies it and makes it part of Windows. This is not innovation; this is the end of innovation. — Larry Ellison

Mother was a falconer. The one who stood on the hills and watched, trying to stave off whatever ill she perceived was coming to her children. She owned copies of our minds in the pockets of her own mind and so could easily sniff troubles early in their forming, the same way sailors discern the forming foetus of a coming storm. — Chigozie Obioma

The theme of counterfeits, of those that produce and sell them, has always been part of the culture of M.I.A. When I was contacted by Versace, it seemed a great idea to invert the circle. Versace's designs have always been copied; now it's Versace that copies the copies, so those that copy must copy the copies. So this will continue. — M.I.A.

No gentleman can be without three copies of a book: one for show, one for use, and one for borrowers. — Richard Heber

Physicists have theorized that we live in an infinite and infinitely expanding universe, and that everything in it will eventually repeat.
There are infinite copies of your mom and your dad and your clothes-stealing little sister. There are infinite copies of you.
Despite what you've spent your entire life believing, you are not a special snowflake. Somewhere out there, another you is living your life. Chances are, they're living it better. — Shaun David Hutchinson

Most chess books only sell a few thousand copies, and a book titled something like "Women in Chess" would sell even fewer. The idea with this title was to spread the book outside the competitive chess world. I'm interested in attracting readers who love chess but play only casually, and feminists interested in male dominated fields. — Jennifer Shahade

This book, 'Stupid White Men,' has sold now over four million copies worldwide. Probably about half of that may be in the U.S. and Canada, and the rest, overseas. — Michael Moore

The problem with the emotions is not that they are untamed forces or vestiges of our animal past; it is that they were designed to propagate copies of the genes that built them rather than to promote happiness, wisdom, or moral values. — Steven Pinker

Jasper!' said Katie. 'Your machine was supposed to be making duplicate copies of all of the things that were photocopied during the week!'
Yes indeed. And so it did.' He flung open a panel. 'All ingeniously copied and transcribed onto one convenient wax roll, quite easily carried between the three of us.' He hefted one end of the wax roll; it was as big as a carpet. 'Come along. It's a mere two hundred and twenty pounds. Try to keep one hand free for making fists. We may have to bash our way out of here. — M T Anderson

Or it might be better to say that all of us need to flee blindly from time to time so as not to become copies of the world's expectations, and maybe, too, to give us the courage to remember some of those great, bold thoughts that made a child get up in the night, heart pounding, and write down a secret promise for his life. — Fredrik Sjoberg

Many nights, Ai-ming said, ignoring my question, her father's music pulled her from sleep. Sparrow, she slowly pieced together, had been one of Shanghai's most renowned composers. But after the Conservatory was shut down in 1966 and all five hundred of its pianos destroyed, Sparrow worked in a factory making wooden crates, then wire, and then radios, for two decades. Ai-ming heard him humming fragments of music when he thought no one was listening. Eventually she came to understand that these fragments were all that remained of his own symphonies, quartets and other musical works. The written copies had been destroyed. — Madeleine Thien

The only real people are the people who never existed, and if a novelist is base enough to go to life for his personages he should at least pretend that they are creations, and not boast of them as copies. — Oscar Wilde

Early publication can be a dubious blessing: we all know writers who would give anything not to have published their first book, and go about trying to buy up all existing copies. — Joyce Carol Oates

We can all take pictures but not everyone can capture the beauty that's usually hidden in plain view ...
We can all open our mouth to sing but not everyone can melodically touch your soul ...
We can all pick up a pen to write but not everyone can write words in such a way that they leap off of the page for you ...
We can all part our lips to speak but not everyone can speak life into you ...
We can all move our bodies to a beat but not everyone can become one with music, stir emotions and shift energy with dance ...
Point is: WE CAN all do something but Know your gifts, cultivate them and ALWAYS, ALWAYS BE YOURSELF! Then working together becomes effortless. Copies aren't accepted everywhere ... ORIGINALS are eventually required! — Sanjo Jendayi

eBooks are just digital copies of analog books. Convenient, yes. But we have the technology now to rethink what a book is. — David Conger

Christian Grey: [answers phone] Anastasia.
Anastasia Steele: Yeah, this is me. I'm sending back your expensive books because I already have copies of those. Thanks though for the kind gesture.
Christian Grey: You're welcome. Where are you?
Anastasia Steele: Oh, I'm in line because I have to pee really bad.
Christian Grey: Anastasia, have you been drinking?
Anastasia Steele: [laughs] Yeah! I have, Mr. Fancy Pants. You hit ... you hit the hail on the nead. I mean the head right on the nail.
Christian Grey: Listen to me. I want you to go home right now.
Anastasia Steele: You're so bossy! Ana, let's go for a coffee. No, stay away from me Ana! I don't want you! Get away. Come here, come here! Go away! — E.L. James

Unless your answers are clearly better, copy the answers of your betters. — Warren Buffett

Copy, not from your industry, from others. You have to go where there is no competition. — Seth Godin

Morgan was sent copies and decided to sue both publishers for libel. — David Cordingly

In Isaac Newton's lifetime, no more than a few thousand people had any idea what he looked like, though he was one of England's most famous men, yet now millions of people have quite a clear idea - based on replicas of copies of rather poorly painted portraits. Even more pervasive and indelible are the smile of Mona Lisa, The Scream of Edvard Munch, and the silhouettes of various fictional extraterrestrials. These are memes, living a life of their own, independent of any physical reality. "This may not be what George Washington looked like then," a tour guide was overheard saying of the Gilbert Stuart painting at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, "but this is what he looks like now." Exactly. — James Gleick

I stopped by Politics & Prose to sign a few copies of 'Constellation.' A couple days later, I learned that Barack Obama also stopped by and left with one of them. — Anthony Marra

Once in every few publishing seasons there is an Event. For no apparent reason, the great heart of the Public gives a startled jump, and the public's great purse is emptied to secure copies of some novel which has stolen into the world without advance advertising and whose only claim to recognition is that The Licensed Victuallers' Gazette has stated in a two-line review that it is 'readable'. — P.G. Wodehouse

Quotations
always inexact. I don't trust people who cannot even copy out. — Jean Rostand

I wished to copy nature. I could not. But I was satisfied when I discovered the sun, for instance, could not be reproduced, but only represented by something else. — Paul Cezanne

It" is the idea of him or her that resides in us--inspired by the "Something" in them, as Pope has it, "That gives us back the Image of our Mind." Although the perception of It must be excited by some extraordinary perturbation in the looks and personality of the adored, the aura that It broadcasts arises not merely from the singularity of an original, as Walter Benjamin supposed, but also from the fabulous success of its reproducibility in the imaginations of many others, charmed exponentially by the number of its copies. The one-of-kind item must become a type, a replicable role-icon of itself--from "a Charles Hart" or "a Nell Gwyn" to "a Mary Pickford" or "a Douglas Fairbanks"--in order to unleash the Pygmalion effect in the hearts and minds of the fans, making the idea of him or her theirs--as much or more than anything else they might call their own. — Joseph Roach

Who are these bloggers? They're not trained editors at Vogue magazine. There are bloggers writing recipes that aren't tested that aren't necessarily very good, or are copies of what really good editors have created and done. Bloggers create a kind of a popularity but they are not the experts. We have to understand that. — Martha Stewart

You've actually just reminded me. I brought you something." She had finally assembled the first two issues of the Dr. Eleven comics, and had had a few copies printed at her own expense. She extracted two copies each of Dr. Eleven, Vol. 1, No. 1: Station Eleven and Dr. Eleven, Vol. 1, No. 2: The Pursuit from her handbag, and passed them across the table. — Emily St. John Mandel

It's nice to have a game that sells a million copies. — John Carmack

But how a game plan came to be, what a finished plan looked like, I had no idea. I'd heard that all copies were shredded as soon as the game was over. — Nicholas Dawidoff

We are all born originals - why is it so many of us die copies? — Edward Young

Percy (One) Our new dog, named for the beloved poet, ate a book which unfortunately we had left unguarded. Fortunately it was the Bhagavad Gita, of which many copies are available. Every day now, as Percy grows into the beauty of his life, we touch his wild, curly head and say, Oh, wisest of little dogs. — Mary Oliver

And once an intelligent robot exists, it is only a small step to a robot species - to an intelligent robot that can make evolved copies of itself. — Bill Joy

Eyeglasses had been in use since the turn of the century, allowing old people to read more in their later years and greatly extending the scholar's life of study. The manufacture of paper as a cheaper and more plentiful material than parchment was beginning to make possible multiple copies and wider distribution of literary works. — Barbara W. Tuchman

I hate lending, or borrowing - if you want me to read a book, tell me about it, or buy me a copy outright. Your loaned edition sits in my house like a real grievance. And in lieu of lending books, I buy extra copies of those I want to give away, which gives me the added pleasure of buying books I love again and again.
Jonathan Lethem — Leah Price

It's like, are you kidding me? I'd sell way more if I just put a picture of my face. That's the fact. I'd sell more copies of me just looking cute. That's what sells more. That's what sells at Wal-Mart. Not someone in a bathtub looking like they're about to kill someone. Topless. — Sky Ferreira

To copy copies is not normally safe, but it is safe to copy Paul, for he was fully surrendered, wholly sanctified, completely satisfied, — Leonard Ravenhill

In the general fiction section Ava discovered a well-thumbed edition of the latest bestseller. One million copies sold! Pah again! She cracked the book open at the spine, knew just where the join was weakest. She laid it open like a sacrificial goat on the carped, hidden between the shelves of books. Then she unleashed her machete, samurai-warrior style, and raising it above her head brought it down, and cleaved the book in twain, splitting it down the middle like a coconut. And that was when, seeing the scimitar rise again, the librarian screamed. — Mark O'Flynn

The more books there are on shelves, the more will be sold. Once you get to the level of The Secret and have 40-100 copies in many stores, managers have almost no choice but to put them in prime real estate like front-of-store, end caps, or front window. — Timothy Ferriss

Be yourself. An original is always worth more than a copy. — Suzy Kassem

Back in the pre-internet age there were pirate publishers, especially in the third world, who would print physical copies of books, sell them, and never inform the author/their agent/their publisher just trousering the money. I think we can agree that this was piracy? — Charles Stross

A lot of bad music sells a million copies; I don't think it's a good litmus test for whether things are going well. — Ben Lovett

I'm all for typewriters, with instant carbon copies, and seeing films in cinemas. — Olivia De Havilland

If Hitler's Mein Kampf (only the Bible has sold more copies his century), his speeches and opinions are the rantings of a madman as is claimed why are they not readily available so that we can judge for ourselves? Is it because the victor's lies cannot bear the cold light of objectivity?
Here then is a rare opportunity to examine the authentic first-hand expressions uttered by German Leader who won the hearts of minds of hundreds of millions of Europeans. — Michael Walsh

Today, we see some "file sharing" sites that rely on fans uploading cracked copies of ebooks, and which then make money off those books by charging for downloads (via cash subscriptions or advertising). Again: I take a dim view of this. They're making money off the back of my work without paying me. — Charles Stross

Today they forget you in five years. They give an artist nowadays four or five years and that's it. Some of them don't have that. They get a couple of releases. If you don't sell two million copies, you're gone, you're out of here. — George Jones

Classroom libraries are not 25 copies of 5 books. Classroom libraries are 1000-2000 copies of different books. — Richard Allington

Did it really matter how many copies of Windows we sold in Taiwan this month when millions of children were without access to books? — John Wood

Japan's very interesting. Some people think it copies things. I don't think that anymore. I think what they do is reinvent things. They will get something that's already been invented and study it until they thoroughly understand it. In some cases, they understand it better than the original inventor. — Steve Jobs

I love books. I'm giving some hard copies of the Sacerdos Mysteries book away because I think there's something so brilliant about them. The digitisation trend is the future but people will still want the feel and smell of real books. — Elizabeth Amisu

Realism to be effective must be a matter of selection.genius chooses its materials with a view to their beauty and effectiveness; mere talent copies what it thinks is nature, only to find it has been deceived by the external grossness of things. — Julia Marlowe

People have one of two extreme reactions to my book. They either throw it across the room, or they rush out and buy 10 copies. The message I'm giving out, that what we think about becomes true for us, and negative thoughts mean good things don't happen, isn't always easy for some people to take. — Louise Hay

You need not to burn copies of a book. Just make people feel indifferent to the book. — Lara Biyuts

CD stores have the disadvantage of an expensive inventory, but digital bookshops would need no such thing: they could write copies at the time of sale on to memory sticks, and sell you one if you forgot your own. — Richard Stallman

According to my royalty statements, 'The Green Progression' sold 392 copies in hardcover. — L.E. Modesitt Jr.

The book of nature is like the Bible: Everyone reads into it what they want, from tolerance to intolerance, and from altruism to greed. It's good to realize, though, that if biologists never stop talking of competition, this doesn't mean they advocate it, and if they call genes selfish, this doesn't mean that genes actually are. Genes can't be any more "selfish" than a river can be "angry," or sun rays "loving." Genes are little chunks of DNA. At most, they are "self-promoting," because successful genes help their carriers spread more copies of themselves. — Frans De Waal

I have copies of the books my grandfather illustrated for Scribner's in each house. I read those books all the time. — Jamie Wyeth