Ben Yagoda Quotes
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What’s the secret to a great popular song? It must be melodically simple and harmonically attractive.
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The upside potential was so high—you could get a good payday with just one thirty-two-bar hit song—and the barrier to entry so low. Anyone could offer his wares—that is, anyone who could handle the indignity of knocking on door after door and being summarily rejected time and again.
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One morning Gordy found out that Columbia Records, previous home of the Motown group the Four Tops, was going to rerelease one of the Tops’ old records. He instructed his top team at the time, Holland-Dozier-Holland, to produce a response, and by early afternoon they’d come up with “It’s the Same Old Song.” The track was recorded later the same day; the record was in stores three days later. It reached number five on the charts and became a classic.
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The Copyright Act of 1909 set the term for copyright of a musical composition to twenty-eight years, renewable for an additional twenty-eight, and for the first time included under copyright “public performance for profit.” That is, anyone playing or singing a copyrighted song had to pay for the right to do so. “Had to” but often didn’t: many bandleaders—and the restaurants and nightclubs that employed them—resisted paying anything to copyright holders, sometimes offering the justification that public performances stimulated sheet music sales.
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The war also made its way into love songs, including such kitsch classics as “Your Lips Are No Man’s Land but Mine” and “If He Can Fight Like He Can Love, Good Night Germany!"
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Thomas Gordon, founder of P.E.T. (Parent Effectiveness Training), observed that when children are behaving in a way that interferes with your ability to meet your needs, shouting direct orders to them doesn't work very well. So, he advised sending I messages. That is, a better alternative to, Your room is a disaster area-clean it up this minute, would be something like, I get embarrassed when Mrs. Johnson is visiting and sees your room looking this messy, so I need you to clean it up.
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Quotes are like cayenne pepper or some other strong spice: a little goes a long way, and too much is a disaster.
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Theorists of journalism have long noted parallels to Heisenberg's uncertainty principle in physics: by reporting on something, one subtly but irrevocably changes it.
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Hoping is a vague, unsophisticated, and largely uninteresting state of mind. One associates it with children and their feelings about birthday presents and snow days. Compared to the surgical precision of sentence adverbs like presumably, ostensibly, and understandably, hopefully is a bowl of mush.
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Memoir today is like one big game of misery poker: The more outlandish, outrageous, or just plain out-there the recounted life, the more likely the book is to attract the attention of reviewers, talk-show bookers, and, ultimately, the public.
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All good writers are sensitive to clichés and endeavor to avoid them.
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I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time.
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One has the sense of her deciding roughly at Page 2 whether or not a book is worthy; reading the rest of it to gather evidence for her case; spending some quality time with the Thesaurus; and then taking a large blunt hammer and pounding the message home.