A Quote by Douglas Adams
There's nothing worse than sitting down to write a novel and saying, 'Well, okay, I'm going to do something of high artistic worth.'
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There's nothing worse than sitting down to write a novel and saying, "Well, okay, I'm going to do something of high artistic worth." It's funny.
Prowling about the rooms, sitting down, getting up, stirring the fire, looking out the window, teasing my hair, sitting down to write, writing nothing, writing something and tearing it up...
It's been a while since I've written a novel aimed at the adult market, but I never sit down and say to myself, 'Okay, now I'm going to write something for us old folks.' I get gripped by an idea, and I go where the idea takes me.
I do feel like I'm in this lucky position where I can write something and people will read it, and I feel like I should say something that's probably worth saying... I feel like it's something worth saying, and one more person saying it is better.
Most people are much better at saying things in letters than in conversation, and some people can write artistic, inventive letters, but when they try a poem or story or novel they become pretentious.
Nothing is worse for me, as an actor, than when I walk on a set and the director goes, "Okay, you're going to be standing here, the other person is going to be standing here, and you're going to move to there and then do the scene." That doesn't help actors.
Before I tell you, I have to know three things," I said. "Okay." "One, are you sitting down?" "Yes." "Two, are you mentally stable?" "More than you'll ever be." Well, that was uncalled for. "And three, how do you spell schizophrenia?" "What does that have to do with anything?" "Nothing. I just wanted to see if you'd tell me.
When you get ready to write your novel, outline it first. There's nothing worse than getting halfway through and realizing you've painted yourself in a plot corner.
Like lots of people who say, 'I'm going to write a novel,' it's actually more comfortable to think I could write a novel than to discover that you can't.
Why do I like to write short stories? Well, I certainly didn't intend to. I was going to write a novel. And still! I still come up with ideas for novels. And I even start novels. But something happens to them. They break up. I look at what I really want to do with the material, and it never turns out to be a novel.
If I sit down to write a young-adult novel, then I'm going to write either to the punch-pulling expectation of what I can't do, or I'm going to go the other way and think about what can I sneak in to be 'down with the kids' - which would be excruciating.
They [candidates] say, "I don't want to say anything controversial." And so nobody covers them. Then they blame the journalists, saying "Why don't they write down what I said?" In congressional races, 90 percent of the time the answer is, "Because you are boring and you don't have anything that makes me interested in listening to you. Why the heck should somebody write it down? There's nothing here worth hearing."
I'm not very prolific. I'm not good at sitting down as an artist and saying 'Okay, I need to put in my four hours today.'
If I sit down with an electric guitar, what's going to come out are Sabbath/Zeppelin type riffs, but if I'm sitting behind a piano late at night, I might write something like 'Desperado.' You're not going to write 'Desperado' between a wall of Marshalls and thumping, crushing volume.
There is nothing worse than not being involved. You are sitting there thinking, 'What exactly am I? A footballer who is not playing football?' You feel a bit worthless sitting in the stands, watching all the time.
We used to write this down by saying, 'move fast and break things.' And the idea was, unless you are breaking some stuff you are not moving fast enough. I think there's probably something in that for other entrepreneurs to learn which is that making mistakes is okay. At the end of the day, the goal of building something is to build something, not to not make mistakes.
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