Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Early on in life I knew that I was a writer, that I just wanted to write, I love books, I love literature and after graduating college, I kind of wandered around in Europe learning languages and writing novels and never led anywhere. And then I got into like journalism in New York as a way to kind of maybe find my way into the field and it wasn't a good fit. It just wasn't right for me.
Printing and transporting paper is very expensive, and e-books eliminate the expensive four-color printing, the higher quality paper, the ocean shipping, the customs clearance, the inventory, answering the telephone, writing up the orders, picking, packing and shipping and managing all of these functions. So we eliminate a huge number of costs and the chance that those books won't sell.
I narrowed my eyes at him. "Stuff that. I'll write a doctoral thesis. Then I can go do what most of the other people with doctoral degrees in anthropology do." "What's that?" asked Calvin. "You don't need to encourage her," said Adam seriously, but his eyes laughed at me. "The same thing that people with degrees in history do," I said. "Fix cars or serve frnech fries and bad hamburgers.
During the first formative centuries of its existence, Christianity was separated from and indeed antagonistic to the state, with which it only later became involved. From the lifetime of its founder, Islam was the state, and the identity of religion and government is indelibly stamped on the memories and awareness of the faithful from their own sacred writings, history, and experience.
As to Don Juan, confess that it is the sublime of that there sort of writing; it may be bawdy, but is it not good English? It may be profligate, but is it not life, is it not the thing? Could any man have written it who has not lived in the world? and tooled in a post-chaise? in a hackney coach? in a Gondola? against a wall? in a court carriage? in a vis a vis? on a table? and under it?
Though it's marvelously entertaining, and I had fantastic fun writing the book, it's not terribly easily, the material, and it's not all that familiar...although we think it is familiar. The processes of the wonderful narratives are very intricate. It's about the charm - the spellbinding charm - of ingenuity, and it's not so easy to remember the plots or the structure or even the names.
Why does one begin to write? Because she feels misunderstood, I guess. Because it never comes out clearly enough when she tries to speak. Because she wants to rephrase the world, to take it in and give it back again differently, so that everything is used and nothing is lost. Because it's something to do to pass the time until she is old enough to experience the things she writes about.
I don't know who they are[my characters] . They're entirely invented characters. Maybe that's how I've been able to write so many books, because there are no boundaries for me. I can write a completely fantastical story like "Swept Away" or "Blinded by the Light" and then a non-comic drama like "Chicxulub" or something like "Birnam Wood" that has autobiographical underpinnings. Why not?
I think it just has to do with getting older and getting better at what it was I was doing, and that I could take something small and kind of take my time with it. I think actually what that has to do with is I quit drinking. Before that I told myself I could only drink if I was - if I was writing, I had to be drinking. So I was on a timer, because eventually you get too drunk to write.
Write every day, line by line, page by page, hour by hour. Do this despite fear. For above all else, beyond imagination and skill, what the world asks of you is courage, courage to risk rejection, ridicule and failure. As you follow the quest for stories told with meaning and beauty, study thoughtfully but write boldly. Then, like the hero of the fable, your dance will dazzle the world.
When I talk to Ryan Murphy or Ali Adler about my past or things in my personal life, occasionally pieces of that will end up in the script, and I think that's true of everybody. It's true of that entire writer's room, certainly of Ryan and Ali. I think that he writes really well for actors, for his actors, and he writes to their strengths. I always feel very well taken care of with him.
My life is split in three parts; I don't know the percentage. One could be called "chess" - the Kasparov Chess Foundation, promoting the game, training young players, playing on the internet, sometimes exhibitions. The second area would be "writing" - books, articles, Twitter, Facebook. And then "political activity" - fighting for human rights and democracy, so TV, interviews, speeches.
If I had to write a rough draft, all the way through and then go back and start over, I probably would just stop writing. I wouldn't find that interesting. I would feel that I had committed so many things to the paper that I couldn't easily undo because one thing leads to the next, the interconnectedness, the sequences would make it very hard to change something that simply didn't work.
I spent a fair amount of time editing the lyrics and allowing the song to kind of evolve. ... anytime there's anything worthwhile, it certainly 'feels' like it happened on the spur of the moment, but it's a composite of lots of spurs of the moment, hopefully. And over time, you catch up with those, and then you have a full set of lyrics you've thought of and you feel comfortable singing.
Sometimes I find it too hot to run, and sometimes too cold. Or too cloudy. But I still go running. I know that if I didn't go running, I wouldn't go the next day either. It's not in human nature to take unnecessary burdens upon oneself, so one's body soon becomes disaccustomed. It mustn't do that. It's the same with writing. I write every day so that my mind doesn't become disaccustomed.
Not write what you know, but know what you write. If you write about a world before, after, or other than this one, enter that world completely. Search it to find your deepest longings and most terrible fears. Let imagination carry you as far as it may, as long as you recount the voyage with excitement and wonder. But this is the most important rule: write the book you most long to read.
I don't feel quite normal if I haven't written for a while. I doubt I will ever again write anything as popular as the "Harry" books, but I can live with that thought quite easily. By the time I stop writing about Harry, I will have lived with him for 13 years, and I know it's going to feel like a bereavement. So I'll probably take some time off to grieve, and then on with the next book!
I love story-writing because I can (more or less, on occasion) actually DO it. That's really the truth. I like the idea that a story is sort of a site for making cool language effects - a site for celebrating language, and, therefore, the world. And the brevity is part of the challenge. I like stories because I get them - I know how to make beauty, or something like beauty, in that mode.
I was really kind of miserable with myself personally and all of the things that you can be creatively, until someone said - and I don't know what about it made it click at this specific time - but they said, "You're not 18 anymore, and you're not writing songs in your old bedroom. It's work. You should get up every day and set a perimeter of time and start compartmentalizing your life."
Part of my function as a writer is to dream awake. And that usually happens. If I sit down to write in the morning, in the beginning of that writing session and the ending of that session, I'm aware that I'm writing. I'm aware of my surroundings. It's like shallow sleep on both ends, when you go to bed and when you wake up. But in the middle, the world is gone and I'm able to see better.
To me living and music are all the same thing. And I keep finding out more about music as I learn more about myself, my environment, about all kinds of different things in life. I play what I live. Therefore, just as I can't predict what kinds of experiences I'm going to have, I can't predict the directions in which my music will go. I just want to write and play my instrument as I feel.
One of the best things I’ve read about that inexplicably, but endlessly, fascinating group of people, the so-called Serious Collectors of 78s. Petrusich burrows into not just their personalities but the hunger that unites and drives their obsessions. She writes elegantly, and makes you think, and most important manages to hang onto her skepticism in the midst of her own collecting quest.
I remember everyone telling me I had to think positive when I was writing my first book. If I believed I could do it, then I could! If I pictured myself published, then it was going to happen! Which sounded great, except...could I do it? If I didn't think I could, was I doomed to fail? What if I was almost totally sure I would fail? I am here to tell you-what matters is sticking with it.
Letterwriting is the natural outlet of the "odds." The busy-bodies, the idle, the perverted, the cranks, the feel-it-my-duties ... Also the plain depraved. They all write letters. It's their safe outlet, you see. They can be as interfering, as long-winded, as obscene, as pompous, as one-idea'd, as they like on paper, and no one can kick them for it. So they write. My God, how they write!
It wasn't long after I began writing Star Wars that I realized the story was more than a single film could hold. As the saga of the Skywalkers and Jedi Knights unfolded, I began to see it as a tale that could take at least nine films to tell - three trilogies - and I realized, in making my way through the back story and after story, that I was really setting out to make the middle story.
When something feels really big, too big to handle, just go very small. Just go real small, just look at the person next to you and look in their eyes and meet the person next to you, find out their name, change one person's life and make one call, write one letter, give one dollar. Whatever small thing feels like what you can do - it changes the course of the ship and that is all it is.
I had written eight drafts of the Lemony Snicket' screenplay when this changing-of-the-guard thing happened, and I said to the new producers, "I don't think I could write any more drafts." I guess I was sort of hoping they would say, "Well that's okay, this last one is perfect." But instead, they said, "It's funny you should say that. We don't think you can write any more drafts either."
My best songs were written very quickly. Just about as much time as it takes to write it down is about as long as it takes to write it...In writing songs I've learned as much from Cezanne as I have from Woody Guthrie...It's not me, it's the songs. I'm just the postman, I deliver the songs...I consider myself a poet first and a musician second. I live like a poet and I'll die like a poet.
My song titles have different reasons for the mistakes. "Don't You Evah," that's just the way that I've always said it, and I just thought it was funnier. "Yr." in "You Got Yr. Cherry Bomb", it's that punk-rock way of writing "your," like "Kill Yr. Idols." And "Rhthm And Soul" was just an actual typo that someone pointed out, and I just said, "Well, I guess that's the way it's gonna be."
Now the truth is, writing is a great way to deal with a lot of difficult emotional issues. It can be very therapeutic, but that's best done in your journal, or on your blog if you're an exhibitionist. Trying to put a bunch of *specific* stuff from your personal life into your story usually just isn't appropriate unless you're writing a memoir or a personal essay or something of the sort.
Someday someone will write a pathology of experimental physics and bring to light all those swindles which subvert our reason, beguile our judgement and, what is worse, stand in the way of any practical progress. The phenomena must be freed once and for all from their grim torture chamber of empiricism, mechanism, and dogmatism; they must be brought before the jury of man's common sense.
And then, once you've written, you meet producers and directors and actors. You get to meet interesting, talented, creative, artistic people, and it also staves off a bit of creative stagnation when you can't act, which is the reality of the industry. So often, you can't act because there are just too many cars and not enough car parks. But, I love writing and I'll never stop doing that.
Today we can say that at last the director writes the film. The image--its plastic composition and the way it is set in time, because it is founded on a much higher degree of realism--has at its disposal more means of manipulating reality and of modifying it from within. The film-maker is no longer the competitor of the painter and the playwright, he is, at last the equal of the novelist
Before I write anything, before I create any assumption in my mind about what it's like to be in that world, I go out there first. I'm very drawn to darkness and light, very drawn to cop drama, because there are very few places besides war and murder and a homicide investigation where you see the extremes of human nature - the darkest crevices and cracks in what people do to one another.
A scrupulous writer in every sentence that he writes will ask himself. . . What am I trying to say? What words will express it?...And he probably asks himself. . . Could I put it more shortly? But you are not obliged to go to all this trouble. You can shirk it by simply throwing open your mind and letting the ready-made phrases come crowding in. They will construct your sentences for you
I want to go on living even after my death! And therefore I am grateful to God for this gift, this possibility of developing myself and of writing, of expressing all that is in me. I can shake off everything if I write; my sorrows disappear; my courage is reborn. But, and that is the great question, will I ever be able to write anything great, will I ever become a journalist or a writer?
Compelling a man by law to pay his money to elect candidates or advocate law or doctrines he is against differs only in degree, if at all, from compelling him by law to speak for a candidate, a party, or a cause he is against. The very reason for the First Amendment is to make the people of this country free to think, speak, write and worship as they wish, not as the Government commands.
There is nothing you can do except try to write it the way that it was. So you must write each day better than you possibly can and use the sorrow that you have now to make you know how the early sorrow came. And you must always remember the things you believed because if you know them they will be there in the writing and you won’t betray them. The writing is the only progress you make.
Finding the form was really a very dynamic process. I went through a lot of shifting, trying to get it right. Because the writing took place over such a long time, it's hard for me to pinpoint when specific things happened, but basically the final version only materialized in the last two or so years. It was there, but it took me a while to see it and then to refine it after I'd seen it.
I can pinpoint the moment when my first band recorded, when I was 14 and 15 years old. I always enjoyed writing songs and playing, but there was something about going in and capturing it that felt very Zen and perfect for me. A light switch went on and I just realized that's where my musical capacity was the most suited. I just followed on blind faith that that was like a calling for me.
I suppose ever since I was about 14, I remember listening to "Sgt. Pepper's," and I remember thinking, "how do you possibly write songs like that?" I remember starting to try and write songs around that age, but just sitting around with an acoustic guitar, and try to come up with ideas for songs, and that's just what I've done ever since. I just never really stopped doing that, I suppose.
I write about how I was attracted to stripping because I didn't feel comfortable with my body, for instance, but there could be plenty of not-so-good reasons why I chose to go into journalism, too. Maybe someone had a trauma in childhood and it led them to become a nurse, or a lawyer, but because people stigmatize sex work they try to find a traumatic moment in your past and say, "There!"
In researching literary agents I did what the books tell you to do: I looked at the acknowledgments page of a book that was similar to mine. Happily, that author thanked his agent. I looked up the agent on the web and found out that he not only represented authors writing books similar to mine, but I knew some of his clients! So, I sent in the manuscript, and they decided to represent it.
For a female to write about her feelings, and then be portrayed as some clingy, insane, desperate girlfriend in need of making you marry her and have kids with her, I think that's taking something that potentially should be celebrated - a woman writing about her feelings in a confessional way - that's taking it and turning it and twisting it into something that is frankly a little sexist.
Grown-ups desperately need to feel safe, and then they project onto the kids. But what none of us seem to realize is how smart kids are. They don’t like what we write for them, what we dish up for them, because it’s vapid, so they’ll go for the hard words, they’ll go for the hard concepts, they’ll go for the stuff where they can learn something. Not didactic things, but passionate things.
Maybe in writing about and through trauma it was therapeutic in a way, but it didn't feel like it at the time. I was in a very dark place, in lots of foreign cities, far from New York. A lot of personal trials and tribulations took over my life in those years. It might be some time before I see what therapeutic function this book did serve. But for now, it's not even easy to read from it.
But the real intent of my writing is not to say, you must think in this way. The real intent is to enrich: here are some of the many important facets of this extraordinary Kosmos; have you thought of including them in your worldview? My work is an attempt to make room in the Kosmos for all the dimensions, levels, domains, waves, memes, modes, individuals, cultures, and so on ad infinitum.
Most people write the same sentence over and over again. The same number of words-say, 8-10, or 10-12. The same sentence structure. Try to become stretchy-if you generally write 8 words, throw a 20 word sentence in there, and a few three-word shorties. If you're generally a 20 word writer, make sure you throw in some threes, fivers and sevens, just to keep the reader from going crosseyed.
Love is what makes you do everything. It really does conquer all. With my first album, I was writing about empowerment hoping that would make it true. And now it is. I'm in charge. I make the rules. I've been writing since I was nine years old and I'm very much involved in the creative process. And now that I'm in a happier place in my personal life, I'm spitting songs out left and right.
At the beginning of the project, I wasn't certain that I could come up with an engaging storyline and cast of characters in this world, so I had a strong bias toward actually writing, and worrying about research later. In other words, I was afraid that I'd devote a year or two of my life to grinding through Kant and Husserl, then discover that there simply was no novel to be written here.