A Quote by Donna Leon

I know you shouldn't spit in your own soup but I think most crime writing is like TV and doesn't make enormous demands on one's intellect. — © Donna Leon
I know you shouldn't spit in your own soup but I think most crime writing is like TV and doesn't make enormous demands on one's intellect.
I started out being a stand up and writing my own material. That took me to 'Talk Soup,' where I was writing and performing for TV.
I especially like to make my own ginkgo soup, bean curd sheet soup, and red bean soup. This way, I can control the sugar portions.
Everyday I eat some soup. This is part of our culture - our mommies and grammies make it, and at any restaurant in Serbia, you can go in and find some soup. There might be minestrone, butternut squash, chicken noodle soup, tomato soup, mushroom soup, lamb soup. Whatever you can find, you can make a soup with that.
I think the most horrible name for a crime has to be manslaughter. ... "I slaughtered a man! Just like a pig! Put him on a spit and put an apple in his mouth!"
In my experience, writing a novel tends to create its own structure, its own demands, its own language, its own ending. So for much of the period in which I'm writing, I'm waiting to understand what's going to happen next, and how and where it's going to happen. In some cases, fairly early in the process, I do know how a book will end. But most of the time, not at all, and in this particular case, many questions are still unanswered, even though I've been working for months.
Spit on your own and you can't do anything, but if you all spit together you can drown the bastards
I think the reason the stories are briskly paced, when they are, is that I like story. I like stories where things happen and there are surprises and reversals, in addition to vivid characters and a memorable voice. So those are the kinds of stories I try to write. And it turns out that's pretty much the only kind of writing that works for TV. It's a medium that just devours story, demands surprises and reversals. So my sensibility is suited to TV storytelling, at least as we think of it today.
But I think you have to accept - as I have accepted - that the demands of TV are different than the demand of book writing.
The library in summer is the most wonderful thing because there you get books on any subject and read them each for only as long as they hold your interest, abandoning any that don't, halfway or a quarter of the way through if you like, and store up all that knowledge in the happy corners of your mind for your own self and not to show off how much you know or spit it back at your teacher on a test paper.
It's hard work, writing, you know. Honestly, a fight every day against your own limitations. You have to squeeze books out of your brain, you're constantly trying to solve challenges. I think most writers enjoy the feeling of having written something, rather than the process of writing it.
If today you can take a thing like evolution and make it a crime to teach it in the public school, tomorrow you can make it a crime to teach it in the private schools, and the next year you can make it a crime to teach it to the hustings or in the church. At the next session you may ban books and newspapers. Soon you may set Catholic against Protestant and Protestant against Protestant, and try to foist your own religion upon the minds of men.
Why is thinking about crime or imagining crime so goddamn central to pop culture? It doesn't matter whether it's American TV or British TV. And there's entire sections of bookstores devoted to crime.
If you do not know your place in the world and the meaning of your life, you should know there is something to blame; and it is not the social system, or your intellect, but the way in which you have directed your intellect.
High SQ demands the most intense personal integrity. It demands that we stand open to experience, that we recapture our ability to see life and others afresh, as though through the eyes of a child, to learn how to tap into our intuition and visualization, as a powerful means of using our inner knowing to “make a difference.” It demands that we cease to seek refuge in what we know and constantly explore and learn from what we do not know. It demands that we live the questions rather than the answers.
With confidence, I think anyone can get a dress and make it their own. I don't think you should have it off the runway and wear it like they want you to wear it. You know, with their hair and makeup - their woman. I just think it's boring. You have to make it your own. That's what fashion is all about.
I started out being a stand up and writing my own material. That took me to Talk Soup, where I was writing and performing for TV. So everything is all the same job in my eyes, and I don't want to ever give up any part of it. I will say that stand-up is my first love; it's how I got started and is in my bones.
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