It's psychologically a weird experience to be so aware of the fact that the real time of your life is moving much faster than the fictional time you're trying to depict. You start to feel very weighted down sometimes.
I am definitely less and less interested in music made by people that exist today, people that are living. I just see them as part of the whole stupid process of the music business, desperate (even if they feign indifference) to get noticed, trying to "make it" in the stinking music business, to become "famous" etc, and it disgusts me.
When I started that's how I wrote because I didn't know any better. I was just like "I want to make music. " Then there were all these things that I learned to get myself over certain humps, but I think it just comes down to: do I have something to say or not? If I'm feeling something I should try to get that out, and maybe it's not words, but trying to turn it into something.
The selection rules are the same for everybody. I am trying to make a comeback just like some other players who got dropped after the Pakistan tour. I hope my time will come.
Politics is like boxing — you try to knock out your opponents.
Trying to out-guess Bonaparte; the thought makes my blood run cold.
I tend to avoid melodrama. I try to create very realistic settings and very realistic experiences and realistic responses to these experiences. Melodrama is the use of really big events that may or may not happen in real life - certainly they do, but they're not events that are common to most people. Most of the things that happen in my novels are things that could happen to people in real life.
Democracy, though slowly attained and never by revolutionary jumps, is the best government on earth when it tries to make all its citizens aristocrats. But not when it guillontines whoever is individual, superior, or just different.
You try to sit down at approximately the same time every day. This is how you train your unconscious to kick in for you creatively. . . . You put a piece of paper in the typewriter, or you turn on your computer and bring up the right file. . . . You begin rocking, just a little at first, and then like a huge autistic child. . . . Then your mental illnesses arrive at the desk like your sickest, most secretive relatives. And they pull up chairs in a semicircle around the computer, and they try to be quiet but you know they are there with their weird coppery breath, leering at you behind your back.
It's no longer just reporting the headlines of the day, but trying to put the headlines into some context and to add some perspective into what they mean.
. . . . try the mustard, - a man can't know what turnips are in perfection without mustard.
In quixotically trying to conquer death doctors all too frequently do no good for their patients' ease but at the same time they do harm instead by prolonging and even magnifying patients' dis-ease.
When you have a flaming hot donut in your hand and your trying to eat it your not worried about 10 and 2
We chose the most interesting image available to us to illustrate the theme of the cover, which is what we always try to do. We apply the same test to photographs of any public figure, male or female: does the image convey what we are saying? That is a gender-neutral standard.
Those who had been riding the upward wave decide now is the time to get out. Those who thought the increase would be forever find their illusion destroyed abruptly, and they, also, respond to the newly revealed reality by selling or trying to sell. And thus the rule, supported by the experience of centuries: the speculative episode always ends not with a whimper but with a bang.
Roman Polanski actually said as much to me once. He had his head in his hands, and I said, "Roman, I've got to tell you, as an actor, seeing the director with his head in his hands. . . Look, I really want to do what you want me to do. " And he went away and he came back, having obviously thought about what I said. And he said, "When my head is in my hands, I'm closing my eyes and trying to remember what I saw in my head, before any of the stuff. "
We waste a lot of time and a lot of talent trying to write for the common reader, whom we will never meet. Instead we should be writing for our ideal reader.
It's complementary. It's fairly clear where the boundaries are. When I start telling you the contents of his head, I am making it up. But I try to make it up based on what is on the record. So even my wildest speculations [on Thomas Cromwell] will have a root somewhere.
Usually I approach to acting completely blindfolded. I read the script, I connect to the character, and then I try not to think about it too much until I'm there and I'm in wardrobe and I'm with the other actors and we're going through the scene once.
You have to have enough respect for other human beings to leave their lives alone. If you admire that life, build it for yourself. Don't just try to come in and take somebody else's life.