A Quote by Jennifer Egan
There are a lot of writers who find a groove and spend a career mining that vein. I seem to be exactly the opposite.
Related Quotes
Programming today is the opposite of diamond mining. In diamond mining you dig up a lot of dirt to find a small bit of value. With programming you start with the value, the real intention, and bury it in a bunch of dirt.
The melodies are always the most important part to me. I am pulled more to the groove than the chord progression. After you find the groove, you find the most simple chord progressions and then sit inside that groove.
Some people seem to sort of have a gut for hiring. I literally had a gut that was exactly the opposite. So whenever I thought someone would be great, it was sort of the opposite.
A lot of guys in New York will only play with an edge. They find their groove and that's their groove. to me, once I do that, there's no point in playing anymore because it should always be a mystery. Depending on who you are playing with, there are hundreds of ways of playing. I think that a master can play all those different kinds of time.
I don't think contemporary writers spend a lot of time reading each other. Particularly writers of the same nationality.
As writers, you spend so long trying to build your cred as a writer, and then everything comes together at the same time: your artist career happens when your songwriter career is, too.
That 'writers write' is meant to be self-evident. People like to say it. I find it is hardly ever true. Writers drink. Writers rant. Writers phone. Writers sleep. I have met very few writers who write at all.
A lot of American playwrights seem to have a career as a playwright. I don't consider it a career at all.
If you spend enough time reading or writing, you find a voice, but you also find certain tastes. You find certain writers who when they write, it makes your own brain voice like a tuning fork, and you just resonate with them. And when that happens, reading those writers ... becomes a source of unbelievable joy. It’s like eating candy for the soul. And I sometimes have a hard time understanding how people who don’t have that in their lives make it through the day.
If everybody is doing it one way, there's a good chance you can find your niche by going exactly in the opposite direction.
I used to go up to her house. She lived upstate [in New York] and I lived in Manhattan; you're living in a lot of noise and my career was being built. For me to spend time with Nina [Simone] is to spend a lot of quiet time.
What we [writers] do might be done in solitude and with great desperation, but it tends to produce exactly the opposite. It tends to produce community and in many people hope and joy.
We also have a lot of the same influences - we both read a lot of the beatniks. And yet what we actually do is almost exactly the opposite. His [ Hunter S. Thompson] political stuff is just wonderful, but basically nothing happens.
I think I've been incredibly raw my whole career. A lot of people spend a lot of time trying to look cool and spend time being guarded and putting up walls. I just never had the time. It seems more honest to say, 'Hey, this is who I am.'
With the first 'Toy Story,' we didn't know what the hell we were doing. We'd never made a movie before, so we went down a lot of blind alleys along the way. We went through seven different writers before we finally settled into our groove.
The will of God is never exactly what you expect it to be. It may seem to be much worse, but in the end it's going to be a lot better and a lot bigger.
Related Authors
Charles Bukowski Quotes
American
Novelist
Charles Dickens Quotes
English
Novelist
Chuck Palahniuk Quotes
American
Novelist
Ernest Hemingway Quotes
American
Novelist
George Eliot Quotes
British
Novelist
George Orwell Quotes
British
Novelist
George R. R. Martin Quotes
American
Novelist
Jane Austen Quotes
British
Novelist
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Quotes
German
Novelist
Margaret Atwood Quotes
Canadian
Novelist
Nicholas Sparks Quotes
American
Novelist
Paulo Coelho Quotes
Brazilian
Novelist
Sarah Dessen Quotes
American
Novelist
Stephenie Meyer Quotes
American
Novelist
Veronica Roth Quotes
American
Novelist
Victor Hugo Quotes
French
Novelist