#authors

Now it is quite clear to me that there are no solid spheres in the heavens, and those that have been devised by the authors to save the appearances, exist only in the imagination. ↗

— Tycho Brahe

#authors #been #clear #devised #exist

I thought it was amazing to work with authors, to get a manuscript and try to make up a cover for it. ↗

— Dick Bruna

#authors #cover #get #i #make

There are so many good authors; there's no shortage of them. ↗

— Jeanne Calment

#good #many #shortage #them

I think that black fiction authors have to work very hard to avoid being typed as seeking only a black audience. ↗

— Stephen Carter

#authors #avoid #being #black #fiction

The society of dead authors has this advantage over that of the living: they never flatter us to our faces, nor slander us behind our backs, nor intrude upon our privacy, nor quit their shelves until we take them down. ↗

— Charles Caleb Colton

#authors #backs #behind #dead #down

I proceed with the proper subject of this discourse; namely, the further changes in scientific belief, which have occurred within my own recollection, even since the time when I first aspired to authorship, now forty- five years ago. ↗

— Asa Gray

#aspired #authorship #belief #changes #discourse

Levi is one of the best authors I've ever read. It's hard not to have an immediate personal response to his work. He has such a quiet tone. ↗

— John Turturro

#best #ever #hard #his #i

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

— George Wald

#editing #products #rather #than

If you can find collaborators whose strengths compliment your own, the result can be more than the sum of its authors. ↗

— Walter Jon Williams

#collaborators #compliment #find #more #own

The approach to digital culture I abhor would indeed turn all the world's books into one book, just as Kevin (Kelly) suggested. It might start to happen in the next decade or so. Google and other companies are scanning library books into the cloud in a massive Manhattan Project of cultural digitization. What happens next is what's important. If the books in the cloud are accessed via user interfaces that encourage mashups of fragments that obscure the context and authorship of each fragment, there will be only one book. This is what happens today with a lot of content; often you don't know where a quoted fragment from a news story came from, who wrote a comment, or who shot a video. A continuation of the present trend will make us like various medieval religious empires, or like North Korea, a society with a single book. The Bible can serve as a prototypical example. Like Wikipedia, the Bible's authorship was shared, largely anonymous, and cumulative, and the obscurity of the individual authors served to create an oracle-like ambience for the document as "the literal word of God." If we take a non-metaphysical view of the Bible, it serves as a link to our ancestors, a window. The ethereal, digital replacement technology for the printing press happens to have come of age in a time when the unfortunate ideology I'm criticizing dominates technological culture. Authorship - the very idea of the individual point of view - is not a priority of the new ideology. The digital flattening of expression into a global mush is not presently enforced from the top down, as it is in the case of a North Korean printing press. Instead, the design of software builds the ideology into those actions that are the easiest to perform on the software designs that are becoming ubiquitous. It is true that by using these tools, individuals can author books or blogs or whatever, but people are encouraged by the economics of free content, crowd dynamics, and lord aggregators to serve up fragments instead of considered whole expressions or arguments. The efforts of authors are appreciated in a manner that erases the boundaries between them. The one collective book will absolutely not be the same thing as the library of books by individuals it is bankrupting. Some believe it will be better; others, including me, believe it will be disastrously worse. As the famous line goes from Inherit the Wind: 'The Bible is a book... but it is not the only book' Any singular, exclusive book, even the collective one accumulating in the cloud, will become a cruel book if it is the only one available. ↗

— Jaron Lanier

#authors #bible #book #books #digitization