Edited by author 03-20-2003 10:06 AM
Good for them!

I ended up pulling chapter-head quotes from a novel, simply because the hoops I'd have to jump through to clear them would take as much effort as all the other editing work combined. Tracing the executors of the literary estate of a dead-but-not-out-of-copyright author so you can run a different one-line quip at the head of a chapter is crazy. We don't expect journalists to jump through these hoops when they quote a line from a public figure, just as long as they attribute it correctly; why is the standard for fiction so much higher?

(Seeking the rights holder's permission makes sense if a substantial extract is needed. But for a one-liner ...? Verily, the law is an equine organism!)