A Quote by Anatole France
When a thing has been said and well, have no scruple. Take it and copy it.
Related Quotes
Anatole France frankly advised, "When a thing has been said and said well, have no scruple. Take it and copy it." Yes, indeed, but do more. Copy many well-said things. Pierce them together. Assimilate them. Make the process of reading them a way to form the mind and shape the soul. As anthologies can never be complete, we will never exhaust the ways quotations can enrich our lives.
[Trey Parker and Matt Stone]called me one Saturday morning and said, "Can you do an impression of Conan O'Brien?" And I said, "I don't know." Because that was really... He hadn't been on the air that long, and to be honest, I hadn't watched much of him at that point. So I went to Santa Monica to their studio and said, "Well, what does he sound like?" They said, "Well, just try it one time. Read the copy." And I read the copy one time, and they went, "Okay, that's fine. Thanks a lot, that'll do. That's perfect."
Some in Europe take a plane, fly to Silicon Valley, visit and look and come back and say we need to do the same thing. Well you can copy others... but if you always copy others, you never get ahead.
Alexander Liberman was very smart, very elegant. At the end, he didn't have much patience with me because I was a young, anxious, nervous photographer. I worried that I was copying too many other people. And he said, "It's all right to copy people, as long as the people you copy are good and you copy them well."
Start copying what you love. Copy copy copy copy. At the end of the copy you will find your self.
A thing said walks in immortality if it has been said well.
Real failure comes when we consider ourselves good enough at something to be able to repeat it rather than to develop it. "Success is dangerous," the painter Pablo Picasso said. "One begins to copy oneself, and to copy oneself is more dangerous than to copy others. It leads to sterility."
[On her use of quotations:] When a thing has been said so well that it could not be said better, why paraphrase it? Hence my writing, is, if not a cabinet of fossils, a kind of collection of flies in amber.
The Chinese are quite entrepreneurial. Remember when Lenovo bought IBM's PC division. It was said that China didn't need a brand name, China didn't need to buy Lenovo to get into the PC business, I remember reading a one-liner somewhere which struck me as quite possibly true, it said the one thing that the Chinese had not been able to copy or figure out was the way, in terms of systems, that Americans - it probably would be true for Europeans as well - that Americans install and live by their management systems, while China is still quite half-assed. Perhaps that is a true statement.
People who copy what exists copy a point-in-time artifact, and if you are managing the process correctly you are already hard at work on the next thing.
Most difficult thing in the world, to write a play. Do you know the story of Shaw at the Fabian society? H.G. Welles said "I'm terribly sorry I've missed the last five meetings, I've been terribly busy, I'm engaged in writing a scientific pamphlet on the effects of radioactivity in 1984 and I've produced a novel, and various pieces of science fiction to do, and I've had a bit of personal trouble, and I had my copy to bring out for the newspaper." Shaw leapt up and said, "I've not missed one meeting, and I have written a play!" hardest thing in the world. If it were easy they'd all be at it.
If you look at items of clothing like denim or polo shirts, they came from someone else's idea and everyone now makes them, but even so, I sometimes want to buy into the newer thing because it looks good or whatever. I mean, I copy many things - almost everything I do could be called a copy in some way. But I copy with a certain respect. I have a high regard for the original, and so I want to put my twist onto that. It's just like sampling music - when it's done well, the new work communicates a respect for the original source material.
I've been imitated so well I've heard people copy my mistakes.
I've always said - I've been making games for twenty years, and from the first day I got in this business, I've been saying, 'All I have to do is sell one more copy than I have to, to get somebody to fund my next one.'
Take care to make things turn out well. Some people scruple more over pointing things in the right direction than over successfully reaching their goals. The disgrace of failure outweighs the diligence they showed. A winner is never asked for explanations.
What good is all the painstaking work on copy if the headline isn't right? If the headline doesn't stop people, the copy might as well be written in Greek.
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