William Godwin Quotes

No one touches me when I write my story, unless I hire you to or I allow you to.

But no one should have the right to manipulate my films in the first place.

It doesn't really feel like it's got anything to do with me. I mean, I know I wrote it, and all that and invented the characters and made it up, but it's Mike's film, so doing the press and stuff, it feels a little bit inauthentic. I was just one component of it.

I want all of my films to belong to me.

Would you care to publish this? Sincerely, Robert B. Parker.

No one can come and claim ownership of my work. I am the creator of it, and it lives within me.

When I'm the one who sits down and looks at the blank page and writes it out all the way, then I'll call it my script.

The story and the characters of 'Girl Online' are mine.

Writing a book is not a crime.

You have two choices when someone changes your work. You can either wash your hands of it or embrace it.

When you are acting, you are just one piece of the puzzle. You don't see how everything fits together. It feels like you have less authorship over the entire product. In directing, you take the entire picture into account, so you're challenged in a different way.

At a magazine, everything you do is edited by a bunch of people, by committee, and a lot of them are, were, or think of themselves as writers. Part of that is because magazines worry about their voice.

I have my pride. I'm a director. I'm not going to go and recreate some other director's vision.

I think copyright is moral, proper. I think a creator has the right to control the disposition of his or her works - I actually believe that the financial issue is less important than the integrity of the work, the attribution, that kind of stuff.

I never really like it when other writers talk about coming in behind people and rewriting.

I think as an artist or a writer it's OK to want to control your own work.

What I do is draw but if you make an animated feature obviously it takes a whole team of people, and Zippy is my work. I felt that turning it over to a team of people would be wrong.

I mean they're making remakes of my films and I'm not even dead yet! Why would you want to make a remake?

Sometimes I've gotten photographs back and people have literally shaven off pieces of me, and I tell them to put it back.

They give me the money, I give them the book. Having input into the adaptation would be kind of like selling a house and coming back three years later and saying, 'Paint it this color!'

It may be tripe, but it's my tripe - and I do urge other authors to resist encroachments on their brain-children and trust their own judgment rather than that of some zealous meddler with a diploma in creative punctuation who is just dying to get into the act.

We are the products of editing, rather than of authorship.

In our day the conventional element in literature is elaborately disguised by a law of copyright pretending that every work of art is an invention distinctive enough to be patented.

I always felt once it goes into movie land, the book belongs to someone else.

A major focus of 'Reality Hunger' is appropriation and plagiarism and what these terms mean. I can hardly treat the topic deeply without engaging in it. That would be like writing a book about lying and not being permitted to lie in it.