Jascha Heifetz Quotes
I occasionally play works by contemporary composers and for two reasons. First to discourage the composer from writing any more and secondly to remind myself how much I appreciate Beethoven.
Quotes to Explore
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Writing a tribe is fun. They have their own language, their own slang; they repeat it, and it becomes part of the texture of the play. For a writer, that's thrilling. That's when my pen flies.
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Emotions come first, and in the most direct sense: you first have an emotion and then have a feeling. But also first in the history of the human race, for the ability to have emotions long preceded the ability to have feelings.
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The problem with writing a monthly book is that you're going through your work like a man running for a bus, red-faced and out of breath. There isn't time for reflection or critical self-examination.
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With sitcom writing, you're trying to write stories.
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The correctness and quality of what you write do not matter; the act of writing does.
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I don't talk about Amy Winehouse as a 'singer.' She's a pioneer. I listened to her endlessly when I started writing.
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I love writing songs.
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I am a great procrastinator. When the writing is going really well, the laundry piles up.
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It's kind of a catch-22 now because since the 'Da Vinci Code,' I have access to places and people that I didn't have access to before, so that's a lot of fun for somebody like me, but I'm always trying to keep a secret. I don't want people to know what I'm writing about.
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The thing that makes writing so difficult is you don't have the element of serendipity. At least with a photograph, you can set up the camera, and something might happen. You might be a lousy photographer, but you can get a good picture if you just take enough of them.
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Special-interest magazines are dangerous places for writers to start out in because the writing quickly falls into a routine and people are likely to find themselves artistically exhausted when they want to work on something of their own.
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I love writing songs. I love doing my radio show and talking to the fans and listening to what they have to say, but there's a certain responsibility that comes along with being given the gift of music. I take that seriously, but at the same time I try to use it to do something that makes a difference in a positive way.
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I think if I was 5-foot-3, I would have been really popular and dated a lot more in high school. I didn't develop like the pretty girl.
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I'm a writer who simply can't know what I'm writing about until the writing lets me discover it. In a sense, my writing process embraces the gapped nature of my memory process, leaping across spaces that represent all I've lost and establishing fresh patterns within all that remains.
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The accidents of my life have given me the ability to make stories in which different parts of the world are brought together, sometimes harmoniously, sometimes in conflict, and sometimes both - usually both. The difficulty in these stories is that if you write about everywhere you can end up writing about nowhere.
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Writing blurbs for books means you have to read the book, and it cuts into the business of bookselling. So every time I get a blurb from a bookseller, I try to write a thank you note.
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When people come to Twitter and they want to express something in the world, the technology fades away. It's them writing a simple message and them knowing that people are going to see it.
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Whenever you're writing something that's reflective, you have to put yourself through some sort of ordeal just to understand the way you're feeling.
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Follow your instincts. Do the kind of writing you love to do and do best. 'Stiff' was an oddball book - I mean, a funny book about cadavers? - and I worried that it would be too unconventional. In the end, that's what has made it a success, I think.
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There is nothing like a dream to create the future.
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Everything you write makes you better. But if you really need a tip, here's one: a good story begins in opposition to its ending. That means you work out how it finishes first, and then begin the story as far away from that point - in terms of character development - as you can.
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My love for dance was so strong.
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One day I was in Starbucks going through one of my books on accounting, and this beautiful young woman came up to me and said, 'My accounting book is different from yours.' Her name was Joyce, she had a background in finance and administration and ran a surgery center. Within a short time, we were married.
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I occasionally play works by contemporary composers and for two reasons. First to discourage the composer from writing any more and secondly to remind myself how much I appreciate Beethoven.
