Learn a lot about the world and finish things, even if it is just a short story. Finish it before you start something else. Finish it before you start rewriting it. That's really important.
It's to find out if you're going to be a writer or not, because that's one of the most important lessons.
Most, maybe 90% of people, will start writing and never finish what they started. If you want to be a writer that's the hardest and most important lesson: Finish it. Then go back to fix it.
If we didn't have the Electoral College there would have been no George W. Bush presidency. Algore would have been elected. The Democrats have not gotten over that, and they never will get over the recount, the aftermath of that election in 2000. They are still animated by it today. It is a significant portion of the rage and anger they carry around with them every day, so they want to get rid of it.
When you build a building, you finish a building. You don't finish a garden; you start it, and then it carries on with its life. So my analogy was really to say that we composers or some of us should think of ourselves as people who start processes rather than finish them. And there might be surprises.
Say what you want to say about the rest of his presidency, including his tone-deaf response to Katrina and a war waged in Iraq on false pretenses, Bush connected with Americans in the aftermath of 9/11 because he looked as frail and unforgiving as we felt.
I find inspiration in each and every person that I cross paths with. Every human being I interact with offers me a significant insight on some aspect of life.
I never think about it much, the visual aspect of it, until we start making the movie. I don't really think about it when we write. When we finish, and I start putting the film together, and we pick the locations, I do think about that a lot.
Science is going to build a base on the Moon! This is a very necessary and a very possible mission! Start and finish! Thousands of problems will arise in this mission, thousands of solutions will be found! Start and finish! Moon is a good hole to enter the blood vessels of the universe. Start and finish!
Photography has escalated almost exponentially! It is a language which covers almost every aspect of communication; factual and expressive.
Writing is not what you start. It's not even what you finish. It's what you start, finish, and put out there for the world to see.
The book that is the closest genetically to 'Goon Squad' is 'Look at Me.' It has the futuristic element - although, freakishly, almost every aspect I invented has come to pass in some way, including the terrorist who fantasies about blowing up the World Trade Centre. That was extremely uncomfortable. The book came out on the week of 9/11.
For President Bush, the first, the 41st president, George Herbert Walker Bush, I spent all 4 years of his presidency on the staff for the National Security Council.
Most people have this protective view of the presidency. Anybody who holds the office is always gonna get the benefit of the doubt unless the media spends four years destroying them like they did Bush, and with Bush not returning fire.
I'm not blaming George Bush. But I don't want Jeb Bush to say my brother kept us safe because September 11 was one of the worst days in the history of this country.
No connection between Iraq and the 9/11 catastrophe.
Monetary relations have penetrated into every nook and cranny of the world and into almost every aspect of social, even private life.
So every day I'm mindful as I watch the Bush crowd extend their sway into policies of every imaginable variety, and over almost every square foot of earth, that the control of the American state is a matter of urgency.