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 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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Originality is not seen in single words or even in sentences. Originality is the sum total of a man's thinking or his writing.
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I like to separate the music- and lyric-writing processes if I can. I'll sort of noodle around on my keyboard and my computer until I have a beat or a chord progression, I'll record it as a loop, export it to iTunes, then walk around with the loop and sort of talk to myself in the loop, and that's how I get the lyrics.
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I started writing rather late in the game. I was fascinated about the story about how Bob Dylan, for 'Nashville Skyline,' wrote between takes. So I'd try to sing new songs off the top of my head. I had rather less than spectacular success on that. But a lot of my songs were done that way.
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The strange thing about writing is that it's so easy to write a novel. It is really easy. But it's getting there to the point where it's easy that's hard. The hard part is to get there.
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I don't like to go to strange places.
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In Italy, food is an expression of love. It is how you show those around you that you care for them. Having a love for food means you also have a love for those you are preparing it for and for yourself.
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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.
