: Re: Attributing a real quote to a fictional character I've looked at a few fictional character quote questions on here but none seem to hit onto my question: Can I attribute a real quote to a

There are two issues here: legal and literary.

Legally, if the quote has fallen into public domain, there's no problem. If not, you're into the whole nebulous area of "fair use". Someone could conceivably sue you for copyright violation for stealing his quote. As we're presumably talking about quotes that are a sentence or two and not dozens of pages, I think you'd win with a fair-use defense, but I'm not a lawyer, an author might possibly have a case.

I think the more important issue is literary. Let's assume there's no legal problem. Still: You can do it as a joke and it could work. Suppose you have an alien from the planet Rothgar say, "As our famous poet Chwarniak once wrote, 'To be, or not to be, that is the question ..." Any even moderately-educated person will recognize that as a quote from Shakespeare and not Chwarniak of Rothgar, and so, depending on the context, they will either find the mis-attribution humorous and laugh, or they'll find it disconcerting and out of place. (I suppose in the context of the story, it might actually make sense, like Shakespeare was really an alien from Rothgar, or the aliens have been picking up the thoughts of Earthmen and thinking they were their own, etc.)

But if the reader is familiar with the quote, what he WON'T do is just accept the misattributed quote matter-of-factly. If the story is otherwise very serious, this could be jarring.

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: What is a productive response to a negative review? I see basically three possible responses: (a) Write a rebuttal ranting that this person is a jerk and his criticisms are totally unfair and

: Re: Attributing a real quote to a fictional character I've looked at a few fictional character quote questions on here but none seem to hit onto my question: Can I attribute a real quote to a

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: I've had quarrels with some of my friends where they say that some book or movie is bad because it depicts people doing evil things. And I say, But look HOW it depicts them! It clearly

: Compiling Articles in an ebook format I write a regular column (of about 800 words) for an industry publication that specialises in management matters. The columns deal with workplace matters

: Is it usual? No. Can you do this? Of course. The question is not, Is there some rule against it in the Laws of Writing that All Authors Must Obey Under Pain of Death? The question is,

: What is a productive response to a negative review? I see basically three possible responses: (a) Write a rebuttal ranting that this person is a jerk and his criticisms are totally unfair and

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