Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I couldn't believe just how emotional I was about the London Olympics. Before the Games even started, I was reading a newspaper sitting in a hair salon and my mom looked over at me and I was just sobbing, because something about seeing the rings and hearing the athletes' excitement and just kind of knowing exactly what they were going through.
What I say is that there are not half a dozen papers in the United States which tamper with the news, which publish what they know to be false. But if I thought I had done no better than that, I would be ashamed to own a paper. You have to make everyone connected with the paper believe that accuracy is to a newspaper what virtue is to a woman.
A duped newspaper or magazine could contend that a fiction-spouting journalist obtained part of his salary via fraud, and use a criminal proceeding to try and recoup that money. Given the profession's notoriously low wages, however, it's probably not worth the publicity headache and legal fees. No news organization has ever pursued such a case.
We never deal with propaganda. We never deal with politics. We never deal with newspaper headlines. We deal with the harsh realities of our lives. We will only comment when there is more bread to eat, more space in which to move, time in which to open your mouth and sing. As long as these things have not happened, we do not talk about politics.
At the breakfast table we are footnoting everything that we read. We don't recognise it as such but we encounter an article in the newspaper and then suddenly we recall that a friend had a certain comment on that particular story, a certain bit of news that we saw on the television applies to that and we immediately assemble an idea of a story.
You can't believe everything you read in a newspaper or everything that's coming out of the president's mouth. And you can't believe when someone posts a picture from their personal life, because most of the time, it's staged - we're showing each other these idealized versions of ourselves so that we seem better and other people will feel worse.
I especially have very fond memories associated with the 10th day of Dassera. My friends and I would meet up and build this huge 7-feet-tall Ravan, which we'd burn at around sunset in our colony. And this was no ordinary Ravan. We'd actually sit and hand-mix the contents of glue and glitter with the dough and wrap it around newspaper for the base.
I had a nice part at big newspapers, small newspapers, and then I went to a very big newspaper - 'The Wall Street Journal.' I wrote longer pieces, and I got tired of working so hard on stories that had a shelf life of essentially one day. So then I started working on longer magazine pieces and realized then that you might as well be writing a book.
A few hours after the news broke about the death of crime writer Donald E. Westlake, a newspaper asked me to write a tribute. In short order I did so, calling attention to his decades-long career, both under his own name and that of his primary alter ego, Richard Stark, who introduced the unsentimental antihero-heister Parker to the literary canon.
I love 'Donnie Brasco' and 'Days of Thunder,' so after I did 'The Skulls,' I was like, 'I want to be either an undercover cop, or I want to race cars!' Universal came to me with a newspaper article about street racing in L.A., and I was like, 'Are you kidding me? I grew up doing that right off Peoria in Sun Valley.' They asked if I wanted to do it.