A Quote by Jerry Della Femina

Nobody can write a good 30-second commercial. — © Jerry Della Femina
Nobody can write a good 30-second commercial.
I had always loved cartoons, especially 'Bugs Bunny,' and I found I enjoyed making animated films. Even a 30-second commercial involved drawing and painting, storytelling, not to mention actors, music, and sound effects.
I was one of those guys, you know, playing and singing, and there was no reason for me to write a song, because there were so many beautiful songs out. And Bob Dylan was always the ultimate songwriter, and nobody could ever write a song as good as him, and nobody ever has written a song as good as him.
It takes a long time to write 10 good songs. Sometimes you have to write 30 to get 10 good ones.
My second 30 is actually very good, where my turnovers are very quick. I just want to put a complete race together, once I get out of my drive phase, I want to hit my next 30 very hard.
I write literary, not commercial, fiction - or so I've been told by my publishers who are proud I write literary fiction but secretly wish I wrote commercial.
One of my big revelations was that nobody cares whether you write your novel or not. They want you to be happy. Your parents want you to have health insurance. Your friends want you to be a good friend. But everyone’s thinking about their own problems and nobody wakes up in the morning thinking, ‘Boy, I sure hope Sam finishes that chapter and gets one step closer to his dream of being a working writer.’ Nobody does that. If you want to write, it has to come from you. If you don’t want to write, that’s great. Go do something else. That was a very liberating moment for me.
Tampon commercial, detergent commercial, maxi pad commercial, windex commercial - you'd think all women do is clean and bleed.
I wanted to write a book about two women falling in love that wasn't hinged on tragedy or that involved some horrible identity-based misfortune. I wanted to write a pretty standard romantic comedy where nobody dies, nobody gets hurt, nobody gets sick.
You don't get shouted at at the 'Guardian.' Nobody bullies you at the paper; nobody tells you what to write. Now, I love working in that atmosphere; I am free to research and write what I want.
I have done a Hamburger Helper commercial, a Hardees commercial, a McDonalds commercial. American Express commercial.
The average TV commercial of sixty seconds has one hundred and twenty half-second clips in it, or one-third of a second. We bombard people with sensation. That substitutes for thinking.
I'm a morning person because I learned to write my novels while still practicing law. I would get to the office at 6:30 a.m. and write until other people arrived, around 9. Now I still do that. I start at 6:30 or 7, and I'll write until 11, then take an hour off, then work until about 2 p.m. By then my brain has had enough.
Believe me, if anybody has a job and starts at 9, there's no reason why they can't get up at 4:30 or five and write for a couple of hours, and give their employers their second-best effort of the day - which is what I did.
The worst thing you can do is make a cult movie. That means you got three great reviews and nobody went. An art film means it got a lot of good reviews and nobody went. There is no such thing as a counter culture now. What used to be considered that is commercial now.
Probably saying a 30-second prayer at a key moment has done more good than any psychotherapy or drugs I've prescribed.
We're a country of five-second sound bites and 30-second commercials. Eight years of one person is just too much.
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