I used to love those little cute bottles of amenities in the hotel room. And while the soap, shampoo, conditioner, and lotion may smell great, they waste an incredible amount of plastic and space in your luggage.
It's very hard to be a screenwriter. I remember getting a couple of awards. I got a PEN West award a million years ago when I did Running on Empty, and I sat in the room with all these writers. They wrote everything from novels to non-fiction to children's books to journalism - any kind of writing - and I realized that there was no one in the room who would ever read anything I'd written.
In my newspaper days, your endings could be literally sliced off in the composing room, so it was dangerous to get attached to them. Yet I think this has made me work harder on endings in fiction.
Embrace the faff. Stare out of the window. Bend paperclips. Stand in the middle of the room trying to remember what you came downstairs for. Pace. Drum your fingertips. Move papers around. Hum. Look at the garden.
It may be a point of great pride to have a Van Gogh on the living room wall, but the prospects of having Van Gogh himself in the living room would put a great many devoted art lovers to rout.
It's impossible having five, six, seven people in a room being creative together and not fight, because you want to fight. It's the only way creativity works, if you all put your ideas in.
It is really crucial that folks focus on their own representatives. If you call or write a member who does not represent you, I can tell you that contact is going to be a waste of time. You might as well just talk to yourself in your living room.
As an actor you have to bring to the table your creative input. But when a director like Ridley Scott says I want you to do this this way, you know when he gets to the editing room he has a reason for it. Its like watching a masterpiece.
Oh," he said, knocking a red ball into a hole. "It's you." "You were expecting someone else?" I asked. "Am I interrupting your social calender?" I made a big show of glancing around the empty room. "I don't want to keep you from the mob of fans beating down your door." "Hey, a guy can hope. I mean, it's not impossible that a car full of scantily clad sorority girls might break down outside and need my help.
I am a partisan for conversation. To make room for it, I see some first, deliberate steps. At home, we can create sacred spaces: the kitchen, the dining room. We can make our cars 'device-free zones.' We can demonstrate the value of conversation to our children. And we can do the same thing at work.
My father Rodger is your typical 'funny without knowing it' kinda guy. When he says something that creates shock or joy in a room, I love watching his confused face as he tries to work out what it is he did.
A microphone has a certain range. It's not as good as your ears, but it will capture an enclosed space, the harmonic content in a room. Nice old tube mikes do that pretty well. And that's a good sound.
Most really good fiction is compelled into being. It comes from a kind of uncalculated innocence. You need not have your ending in mind before you commence. Indeed, you need not be certain of exactly what's going to transpire on page 2. If you know the whole story in advance, your novel is probably dead before you begin it. Give it some room to breathe, to change direction, to surprise you. Writing a novel is not so much a project as a journey, a voyage, an adventure.
There's things people say in the barbershop they won't even say in their own living room, because it's just one of those zones where nobody's going to judge you too much about your dumb opinion.
When I did 'Racing Demon' by David Hare, I worked with Paul Giamatti, who had stacks of books in his dressing room. I was offstage a lot, so I would go read in his room. He was reading a four-part series on the Byzantine Empire by Alexander A. Vasiliev. I read two of those during the run of the play.
If you have 8-foot ceilings, you'll want a low sofa, which gives the impression that the ceiling is taller than it is. In a room with a high ceiling, you want a high-back sofa to be a weighty presence that can hold up to the room.
And [now] I think I’ll probably write a lot about birds. My new house has a deck that wraps around my writing room; my writing room has many windows, and outside the windows I’ve hung bird feeders … for enticing different species. So I imagine I will be writing about that.
I have a very beautiful room that in my house that we bought in Princeton. It's glass on three sides, and you'd think that's the perfect place to write. Somehow in that nice room I feel too exposed, and I can notice I'm too distracted by things going on, so I end up writing in a not-very-nice office bedroom.
The only job that ever really worked for me was teaching because you are your own master once you get into the room. You just have to show up on time and talk about what you care about.
I literally coded Facebook in my dorm room and launched it from my dorm room. I rented a server for $85 a month, and I funded it by putting an ad on the side, and we've funded ever since by putting ads on the side.
A lot of times, the press guys ask why I take an hour and a half to come to the interview room, but if you don't do the massage and the ice baths and the stretching and the cooling down and the eating, and your opponent is doing that stuff, they already have an advantage.
If you don't feel strong desires for the manifestation of the glory of God, it is not because you have drunk deeply and are satisfied. It is because you have nibbled so long at the table of the world. Your soul is stuffed with small things, and there is no room for the great.
In some cases where the team is mixed, there's almost two practices going on in one, where your young guys are getting the work they need, and the older vets are in the weight room getting strength and conditioning.
As an actor you have to bring to the table your creative input. But when a director like Ridley Scott says I want you to do this this way, you know when he gets to the editing room he has a reason for it. It's like watching a masterpiece.
Life can take so many twists and turns. You can’t ever count yourself out. Even if you’re really afraid at some point, you can’t think that there’s no room for you to grow and do something good with your life.
The lobbies are always the best-looking place in the hotel-you wish you could bring out a cot and sleep in them. Compared to the lobby, your room always looks like a closet.
There are answers which, in turning away wrath, only send it to the other end of the room, and to have a discussion coolly waived when you feel that justice is all on your own side is even more exasperating in marriage than in philosophy.
There's room for everyone. There's room for pop country, for 'rock & roll' country, for stone-cold country, and everything in-between. Great music is great music.
When you write, you're alone in a room. And when someone reads a book, they're alone in a room, too, usually. It's a really intimate exchange. And so people ask me where I get the boldness to talk about this or that, but I didn't feel like it required any sort of courage, because I was alone. Sometimes it feels weird for people to read it.
For some people, when you walk into a room, what your fame means to them can be like pointing a weird gun at them. It triggers something. They might get really giggly or flirty or cold or confrontational.
Small hotels are going to be in vogue. In my view, small is going to be the new big, wherein people will rethink a lot about going back to that 1,000-room hotel versus going to a 40-room niche hotel.
Only an open mind still has room for new knowledge. What is outgrown and used up must be discarded to make room for what is yet to be learned. And much of the best thinking is done alone-in deserts, on beaches, in bed, behind closed doors. It is why we say we need to get away-to escape from clutter and busyness-to hear ourselves think.
In wrestling, people just throw each other around, possibly actually bleed, and are still friends in the locker room afterwards. But there's a real glee - a feeling goes up in the arena, especially on non-TV days. If it's just people in a room and somebody starts to bleed, that's very exciting.
Today, every skirmish in every part of the planet is broadcast straight into your living room live, in HD... over and over again.
Take care of things close to home first. Straighten up your room
before you save the world. Then save the world.
When you are writing a book, it feels as if you are simply concentrating on the world of the book and that whatever is happening in your personal life is outside the room, as it were. But maybe that's just the way you have to talk to yourself to make it possible.
The only person stopping you from doing something is yourself, and looking for excuses all the time just gets in the way of obtaining your own goals. It's like the writer who keeps getting up and straightening the pictures in the room.
Writing is a very strenuous thing - it's like banging your head against a wall. At the end of the day, acting is better, just because nobody ever asked me if I wanted a Pellegrino in the writer's room.
[To the critic who wrote a negative review:] I am sitting in the smallest room of the house. Your review is before me. Soon it will be behind me.
Some of the most controversial things I've said about President Trump, I've heard from Republicans. But it's just that I've heard them in the locker room. That's what people actually talk about in the locker room - how terrible our president is.
I think control is the wrong word. I would put it this way. You see a lovely girl across a crowded room and you walk toward her with hope in your mind. That's the way [my] pictures are made.
By the time you get to your sixth record, some of the benefits of being in a band are grander than ever, but some of the obstacles are just massive. You deal with these lateral subjects, and all that is left is the elephant in the room.
In a newspaper, you only have so much room. It teaches you the value of getting to the point, of not pampering yourself with your glorious writing. I've always been much more interested in one powerful sentence that stays with you. That's my style.
The more comprehensive your language is, the more likely people are to believe everything you're saying. It really just comes from the power of knowing you're the smartest person in the room, and if you aren't, you're definitely going to sound like it.
If you do a fifteen hour day on a film, there's a lot of time standing around but at the end of that, you want to go home to your hotel room and have a bite to eat, watch a movie and go to bed.
World music can be sometimes like the lumber room in which all the non-English singers are dumped. When you are singing in Arabic, no matter what your style of music or artistic proposition is, you are faced with some of that reality.
So much magazine writing is playing to an empty room. You work like a plow horse, your words get printed on a half-million or more copies, and then it often just disappears into this national vacuum.
It's not a loup cage, you know,' I told her. 'It's a holding cell. Or safe room. or secure room. I don't think Jim ever settled on a term he could live with.' 'Aha. It's a loup cage.' Andrea cleared her throat. 'I touched it with my finger and it hurt. Is that in case of marital problems?
I became an ifrit to save the lives of my fellow jinn. What kind of life saver would I be if I let you sit here and wither away in paradise? Just an obstacle. Just an obstacle. I meet the ifrit's eyes. What happened to all your talk about birds and fish having nowhere to live? The ifrit shrugs. I suggest you start holding your breath, my friend, he says, then pushes through the hearing room doors.
Heaven, Kiwi thought, would be the reading room of a great library. But it would be private. Cozy. You wouldn't have to worry about some squeaky-shoed librarian turning the lights off on you or gauging your literacy by reading the names on your book spines, and there wouldn't be a single other patron. The whole place would hum with a library's peace, filtering softly over you like white bars of light.
It's an honor to be the only woman in the room a lot of times, but I wish I weren't the only woman in the room. I still have to think in a calculated way about how to speak and what to speak about.
We'd been apart so long--I'd been dead so long," she said in English. "I thought surely you'd built a new life, with no room in it for me. I'd hoped that." "My life is nothing but room for you." I said. "It could never be filled by anyone but you.
There's an awful lot of hanging around when you're doing science fiction. Going down and waiting for them to set up, being told to go back to your dressing room while they change the track and the lighting and so on.
I didn't think 'The Room' was going to really go anywhere. But you know, in the back of your mind, you hope that any project you do is going to to go somewhere.
My partner and I had our first son in 1996, and the office became the baby's room. Our second son was born in 2001, and the office became the kids' room.
Medicine is learned by the bedside and not in the classroom. Let not your conceptions of disease come from words heard in the lecture room or read from the book. See, and then reason and compare and control. But see first.
I have to think in terms of musical tempo. Let's say someone comes into a room and slowly sits down or someone rushes into the room and rushes to sit down. That's how to work out the tempo of the music you produce.
Every so often, you want to map out your plot mythology but never so specifically that you can't let a story surprise you. You want to allow the type of action of the writer's room so that you have the ability to take a left turn.
Practice sharing the fullness of your being, your best self, your enthusiasm, your vitality, your spirit, your trust, your openness, above all, your presence. Share it with yourself, with your family, with the world.
No matter what, I'm trying to have fun and, depending on the mood, fun can be on a roller coaster and playing onstage, or fun can be sitting in a room with three of your best friends talking for two hours.
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