A Quote by Ben Dolnick

One of my more hectoring voices, throughout my career, has been the one that says I ought to stop what I'm doing and make an outline. — © Ben Dolnick
One of my more hectoring voices, throughout my career, has been the one that says I ought to stop what I'm doing and make an outline.
I've been so fortunate throughout my career, when I was doing theater - more theater than anything else - and when I was doing films, that I got a chance just to do a broad range of things.
I've been so fortunate throughout my career, when I was doing theater, more theater than anything else, and when I was doing films that I got a chance just to do a broad range of things.
There's that talent thing where I can score goals, and there's also that want and ambition to keep doing it and doing it and doing it. I've seen a lot of players do it for a year and then they rest on their laurels, but I've been very driven throughout my career. Without being the most talented, I think I've tried to make the most of it.
I'm a big fan of outlining. Here's the theory: If I outline, then I can see the mistakes I'm liable to make. They come out more clearly in the outline than they do in the pages.
I seem to have been able to make a career out of doing what I feel like doing, so why not keep doing it? What's corrupting is wanting to be more important. You want to be more arty - you get your identity from that. Or you get your identity out of making more money.
I've been streaky throughout my career, but I've been trying to become a more consistent hitter.
I had a moment where I realised I could do silly voices, that lots of people I knew couldn't do silly voices, and that thus I must be able to make money doing silly voices.
We ought to enjoy our food, we ought to take time and care and prepare it correctly, and we ought to have fun doing it and make it a communal event.
I don't start a novel until I have lived with the story for awhile to the point of actually writing an outline and after a number of books I've learned that the more time I spend on the outline the easier the book is to write. And if I cheat on the outline I get in trouble with the book.
You wake up and you feel - what? Heaviness, an ache inside, a weight, yes. A soft crumpling of the flesh. A feeling like all the surfaces inside you have been rubbed raw. A voice in your head - no, not voices, not like hearing voices, nothing that crazy, just your own inner voice, the one that says 'Turn left at the corner' or 'Don't forget to stop at the post office,' only now it's saying, 'I hate myself.' It's saying, 'I want to die.'
Throughout African-American literature, the writer has, in a sense, been burdened by the necessity of pleading the case for the whole race. For example, writers of slave narratives tend to lose their individual voices, as they were expected to stand in for all other voices, which were absent.
The Basic Eight and Watch Your Mouth both have first-person voices, and I ended up investigating those voices and investing so much in them that I think many people took them more seriously than they ought to have.
I struggle with my training sometimes. The thing I look at is if you keep getting up and moving forward, you'll be successful. That's the way I've lived my life. I'm not going to stop doing something because somebody says it's time. I'm going to stop it when my body says it's over or the fans say, 'we're done watching you.'
I outline and outline and outline, and then I'm very specific about the stuff I write. That's my process.
Whether Osama bin Laden is doing it cynically and has no interest in these matters, or whether he's doing it out of genuine conviction, his voice has a tremendous resonance throughout the Arab world. One editorial in a Lebanese paper said it is a matter of great humiliation for the Arabs that the only man who can outline, truthfully, what our humiliations are is an Arab who has to say it from a cave in a foreign country.
I make more than a handsome living doing voices for commercials; I hear myself all day on the tube.
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