People often think that reporters write their own headlines. In fact, they almost never do. The people who do write headlines are the copy editors who are the front and last lines of quality-checking in a newspaper before it goes to print.
By the time I was 10 or 12, I had discovered the lure of the romance genre – and the dusty copy of ‘The Thorn Birds’ on my parents’ bookshelf.
Obviously, don’t copy everything we do.
I used to sit for hours and copy every lick on those early AC/DC and Kiss records. From there, I went on to Eric Clapton and Stevie Ray Vaughan. After a while, you kind of develop your own style.
I have been a journalist, off and on, since I was 17. I was a copy boy for the ‘New York Times,’ when it had an edition in Paris, in 1963. I sold the paper in the streets by day and tore wire copy off the tele-printer for the editors making up the edition by night.
I think I was always so resistant to coloring my hair because, you know, when my dad was still alive, it’s so easy for a second- or third-generation wrestler to just copy their predecessor. The hardest thing you can do is try and carve out your own legacy.
Be the best version of yourself rather than a bad copy of someone else!
Whereas recessive traits require two bad copies of a gene to become noticeable, a dominant trait expresses itself no matter what the other copy does. A benign example of dominance: If you inherit one gene for sticky wet earwax and one gene for dry earwax, the sticky earwax gene wins out every time.
I wrote a best-selling book, and if you don’t believe me, you can come into my basement; I’ll show you every copy.
I don’t try to make the guitar sound like the harpsichord or lute. That makes you end up being like a bad copy.
You can’t just copy someone. There are so many different styles that you can just kind of pick and choose whatever it is you’d like to do.
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.
Copywriting probably did make me a commercial writer. Nobody wants to read advertising copy, so you have to keep it punchy; you almost have trick them into reading it. You have to make every sentence work.
It’s like I was always not quite sure even how to move in space somehow; I would watch people and then copy them. I found it really hard to walk straight. My brother was always on at me for walking off the pavement. I guess I always expected people to bring me back into line.
When I first redesigned the ‘Surfer’ magazine, a magazine about magazines took a copy to the famous American designer Milton Glaser, and – surprise surprise – he hated it.
I was given a thick paperback copy of the ‘Guinness Book of Records’ when I was 11 years old, and I read it gluttonously, cover to cover, paying special lip-smacking attention to all the incredibly gruesome chapters about the violence of human history.
The music is a personal expression, like art. It is something that you like doing that comes from within, and is an expression that comes from God. That is why artists are beautiful and why people who copy are not really artistic.
Copy nature and you infringe on the work of our Lord. Interpret nature and you are an artist.
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.
My ideal reader is somebody who trips over a copy of my book on the sidewalk; then they pick it up and read as they walk. Somebody who comes in knowing nothing, caring nothing, but responds to the story.
I was determined to carve out a music of my own. I didn’t want to copy anybody.
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!
When I see kids standing next to their mothers at book signings, clutching a copy of ‘Forever,’ I know what’s coming. They’ll say to me, ‘How old do I have to be to read this?’ hoping I’ll give them permission. But I can’t do that.
‘You Talk’ was originally a copy of a certain Velvet Underground song.
We learned in the university to consider Wordsworth and Keats as Romantics. They were only a generation apart, but Wordsworth didn’t even read Keats’s book when he gave him a copy.
I go to the lab and in order to interact with my postdoctoral students and try to see if I can shape them to not copy but to ask questions and to think. We have to have a little dialogue because you don’t pretend to be the fountain of all wisdom.
My father worked for Unilever, running a mass-spectrometry lab – mass spectrometry is a process for elucidating the chemical structures of molecules, which means that he presided over a legal form of corporate espionage, breaking down the component parts of competitors’ products in order to copy them.
When I was preparing ‘Kiss Me, Kate,’ I did go to the Museum of Broadcasting and watched an old kinescope of Alfred Drake doing the role on a television special. It was interesting, but I didn’t feel any need to try to copy him.
The main problem I’ve always had with fashion media is that women are encouraged to copy other women.
If you’re ever bcc’d, do not go near ‘reply all.’ ‘Bcc’ is ‘blind carbon copy.’ It means you’re a fly on the wall, dude! If you hit reply all, it’s beyond bad etiquette to out the person who gave you the superpower of invisibility. It’s like screaming, ‘I’m a spy!’
I just saw a copy of a cover of a magazine that I’m on, and it’s very weird and unusual.
With a computer, you make your changes on the screen and then you print out a clean copy. With a typewriter, you can’t get a clean manuscript unless you start again from scratch. It’s an incredibly tedious process.
‘Girls’ is a huge show, as far as buzz, and magazine covers, and getting a ton of copy, and awards. And yet I don’t think the viewership is huge.
Writers’ bedtimes vary, but few have been spared the shock of a copy editor’s early wake-up call.
You can imagine a soul as being a detailed, elaborate pattern that exists very clearly in one brain. When a person dies, the original is no longer around. But there are other versions of it in other people’s brains. It’s a less detailed copy, it’s coarse-grained.
You know how most kids have posters of sports heroes on their walls? They gave me reams of the old news copy, and I had those taped in my bedroom. And I would practice reading the news.
An author is somebody who writes a story. It doesn’t matter if you’re a kid or if you’re a grown-up, it doesn’t matter if the book gets published and lots of people get to read it, or if you make just one copy and you share that book with one friend.
Everyone tells me I have a funny accent. It’s because I copy people. I learned English at school but have best friends who are French, Australian, English and American; a very weird mix.
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.
I still have my high school copy of the collected Poe – missing its covers and pretty worse for the wear.
When you are small, and you have to try and prove yourself, it is tough. When others are catching up and copy you, that’s tough. We constantly need to change ourselves to stay ahead of the game.
I like to read non-fiction on my e-reader, but as for fiction, I usually like to have a copy to keep at home.
After I made ‘Oh Carolina’ in the 1990s, the record company wanted me to copy that sound, and I refused.
People want to listen to a lot of music and do whatever they want with it. They don’t want DRM, they don’t want subscriptions. They don’t want a player that only can do this but can’t do that and you only have one copy. They don’t want that. You know? I don’t want that.
Beauty can grow as a whole, since you shouldn’t copy other people.
I want to show the absurdity on the process of putting a value to a copy.
You should keep a copy of your tax return indefinitely, but you need to save supporting documents for only three years.
When you draw or paint a tree, you do not imitate the tree; you do not copy it exactly as it is, which would be mere photography. To be free to paint a tree or a flower or a sunset, you have to feel what it conveys to you: the significance, the meaning of it.
I picked up my college copy of ‘The Great Gatsby’ in an attempt to recover from the movie and was interested to find out what I’d underlined. The answer was basically: everything.
I’m not anti-Hollywood; not at all. In fact, I’m rather fascinated by everything that goes on here. When I get hold of a copy of ‘Variety,’ I read it cover to cover; I love to know what people are doing.
