A Quote by Emily Gould

A lot of people get to the point in their careers where blurbs are ghostwritten for them, because they're like, "I want to support this person, it's good for my career," and so they get someone at the publishing house to do it, or they copy something from the press release. People write their own blurbs, absolutely, some huge percentage of the time.
I very much write from characters. Those people start speaking, and then I have them in the house with me and I live with them. Then at some point, it's time to get them out of the house. You can only live with someone like Dr. Georgeous Teitelbaum from THE SISTERS ROSENSWEIG for so long, and then it's time for her to go. But it is very like having the company of these people and trying to craft them in some way into a story.
Like a lot of small press founders I was looking for a way into publishing - as well as a way out of academia. Without moving to London, I couldn't see a way of working for a publishing house whose work I liked. Believe it or not, the simplest way for me to get into publishing was to start my own press.
Writing blurbs for books means you have to read the book, and it cuts into the business of bookselling. So every time I get a blurb from a bookseller, I try to write a thank you note.
I've stopped going to see art films because every critic gives them four stars and say things like 'masterpiece,' 'spellbinding' and 'mesmerizing.' I mean, they're doing that with my film, but I don't want to use those blurbs. Critical reviews aren't worth too much anymore because just about every film can get one or two of them.
For a short period of time, I was like, I have these jokes and if people get them, they get them. And then eventually, I was like, Oh no. It's absolutely my job to convey to people why what I think is funny, is funny. The whole point of standup is to get the audience to understand your weird point of view.
When I started teaching, I would get miffed if a student asked me to write him or her a recommendation for law school - I'd feel like that's not what we were doing in the course. But now I see that person as someone who might be gainfully employed. I bring in a lot of people to speak to my classes, and I've gotten to the point where I've expanded the type of guests I invite to include people both inside and outside of the traditional publishing world.
I've tried to tell people that the reason I don't really get excited over good press is that I don't want to get agitated over bad press. I don't wanna get too high on good press, too low on bad press. It's just not a healthy way to engage with my own feelings about my music.
To some extent the shorter the writing assignment is, the harder it is to accomplish, and a blurb is 200 words max. Blurbs are meaningless, and actual people who are buying the books don't care about them at all.
Star kids always get an upper hand at the start of their career. People in the industry often know them from the time they were toddlers, so they show support to them when their film is about to release.
I think a lot of people try to plan things in their career. They feel like, If I don't get this done by the time I'm thirty, everything's over. But I've worked with a lot of people whose careers shot to the top later in life.
I'm a blowfish. I'm not a shark, I'm a blowfish. So that perfect example about me hitting my head, it's like a blowfish. I wasn't coming out of my house going to a paparazzi's house to attack them. I'm defending my family in front of my own house. I'm defending my name as someone's screaming something negative at me. That's a blowfish. People have me pinned as a shark or a predator in some way, and in no way am I that. I wouldn't want to hurt anyone. I want to defend people. I want to help people.
I am proud of the hip hop generation. They are good business people and, actually, good people. It's strange that the only time the major press talks about them is when someone gets killed or does drugs or something; yet these are the same press people who made heroes out of the Mafia and other crooks, you know.
There are many different types of people that end up coming to me and saying 'Yeah I want to cook.' Some of them successful, some not. There's no one formula, but if I get someone coming through the backdoor who knows that they want to get into the cooking field, they feel this inside-out love for it, this attraction to it, that person is an awful lot easier to work with.
There are a lot of opportunities in journalism that are like that, where if you have good ideas and really care about something, and you persist, you can get them. Show up in person. Write that extra email. It goes much farther than people realize.
I want someone who will love me for the person I am and not because of my status. It has to be someone who understands the pressure of playing for India. It will be very difficult to be with a person who has her own career because someone has to make sacrifices for the family and house.
People can get a bit like, "Oh my God, your life is different than mine." But no, it's not. Everyone's got the same problems. We all get jobs, and we lose them. We have a good time, and we don't have a good time. It's changed in that some people have a certain expectation of what they might find when they meet me, which sucks, because I'm not that thing.
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