Up until relatively recently, creating original characters from scratch wasn't a major part of an author's job description. When Virgil wrote The Aeneid, he didn't invent Aeneas; Aeneas was a minor character in Homer's Odyssey whose unauthorized further adventures Virgil decided to chronicle. Shakespeare didn't invent Hamlet and King Lear; he plucked them from historical and literary sources. Writers weren't the originators of the stories they told; they were just the temporary curators of them. Real creation was something the gods did. All that has changed. Today the way we think of creativity is dominated by Romantic notions of individual genius and originality, and late-capitalist concepts of intellectual property, under which artists are businesspeople whose creations are the commodities they have for sale. . Lev Grossman
Some Similar Quotes
  1. Productiveness is your acceptance of morality, your recognition of the fact that you choose to live--that productive work is the process by which man's consciousness controls his existence, a constant process of acquiring knowledge and shaping matter to fit one's purpose, of translating an idea... - Ayn Rand
  2. I think that you’ve got to make something that pleases you and hope that other people feel the same way. - Thomas Keller
  3. All our knowledge has its origin in our perceptions - Leonardo Da Vinci
  4. What keeps life fascinating is the constant creativity of the soul. - Deepak Chopra
  5. Anymore, no one's mind is their own. - Chuck Palahniuk
More Quotes By Lev Grossman
  1. I got my heart's desire, and there my troubles began.
  2. [F]or just one second, look at your life and see how perfect it is. Stop looking for the next secret door that is going to lead you to your real life. Stop waiting. This is it: there's nothing else. It's here, and you'd better decide...
  3. The truth doesn't always make a good story, does it?
  4. It was so much easier to be angry. Being angry made him feel strong, even though-- and this contradiction did nothing to diminish his anger-- he was angry only because his position was so weak.
  5. In Fillory you felt the appropriate emotions when things happened. Happiness was a real, actual, achievable possibility. It came when you called. Or no, it never left you in the first place.
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