Catherynne M. Valente Quotes

It's one thing if you write a song and somebody else sings it because you give the OK. But if your voice is on something and you don't get the credit, it's kind of hard.

'Would I mind if someone wrote a sequel to one of my books?' I asked myself, and I decided that I wouldn't, providing that the writer was respectful, had read my book first, and wasn't drunk when doing it.

I don't believe in the ownership of work.

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.

Copyright rewards originality, not effort.

Creativity in copyright law only means that you didn’t copy it from someone else …. Most works that are protected under copyright are not creative in the colloquial sense of the word.

Since [some] American publishers pay nothing to the English authors whose stories they appropriate and publish, other American publishers can not to afford to pay American authors for writing stories.

There's a difference between hiring writers and stealing jokes.

When I created the email in the U.S., my mentor could have easily copyrighted it and taken credit for it.

I'm pretty ruthless about that; I think when you sign over your story, you sign over your story.

Authors from whom others steal should not complain, but rejoice. Where there is no game there are no poachers.

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

If we're talking about someone creating something new, those rights are fairly well defined (in the United States, at least) under existing copyright law. But then there's often discussion about the rights of people who produce works under work-for-hire arrangements, which can be far more subtle and nuanced.

Be careful that you do not write or paint anything that is not your own, that you don't know in your own soul.

Too afraid of plagiarising someone, so I stopped reading fiction in 1981.

Most books today seemed to have been written overnight from books read the day before.

If we enter into the kind of world that Google likes, the world that Google wants, it's a world where information is copied so much on the Internet that nobody knows where it came from anymore, so there can't be any rights of authorship.

I was unwise enough to actually mention this in public a few times, and in fact to point out that there were two versions of the book now. One of them had somebody else's name on the cover, one had my name on the cover.

I want all of my films to belong to me.

I think people who sample are cheating. It is like people who do collages. Use all of your own stuff.

'Sabotage' was a work for hire. It wasn't my original idea or script or anything.

The idea of copyright did not exist in ancient times, when authors frequently copied other authors at length in works of non-fiction. This practice was useful, and is the only way many authors' works have survived even in part.

I cannot say how strongly I object to people using other people's writing as research. Research is non-fiction, especially for horror, fantasy, science fiction. Do not take your research from other people's fiction. Just don't.

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.