A Quote by John Updike
The literary scene is a kind of Medusa’s raft, small and sinking, and one’s instinct when a newcomer tries to clamber aboard is to step on his fingers.
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You think my first instinct is to protect you. Because you're small, or a girl, or a Stiff. But you're wrong." He leans his face close to mine and wraps his fingers around my chin. His hand smells like metal. When was the last time he held a gun, or a knife? My skin tingles at the point of contact, like he's transmitting electricity through his skin. "My first instinct is to push you until you break, just to see how hard I have to press." he says, his fingers squeezing at the word break. My body tenses at the edge in his voice, so I am coiled as tight as a spring, and I forget to breathe.
It's gotta be hard when you are a newcomer to this kind of thing, this big political scene and you have somebody like Michael Bloomberg come in with hundreds of millions of dollars, dumping it in.
But I'm not a small-literary-novel kind of guy, and once I'd developed the world in the first couple of hundred pages, I felt that there was potential here to go on and write an engaging story set in that world. So that's what I did. This probably ruins things both for the people who want small literary novels and for those who want action-packed epics, but anyway, it's what I wrote.
Waiting is a huge part of being a refugee. You're waiting at borders to get across. You're waiting for transportation. The waiting that people do in Turkey to get aboard one of these boats is incredible. And then when they finally do get aboard, it's the last place they want to be. It's harrowing. That is the horrible irony of a refugee's life. You wait and wait for the next step, and when you get to the next step, it's awful. You don't want to be doing it. But you have to. You have to keep moving forward.
Ahmadinejad is just a buffoon, sort of a clown on the international scene who tries to be provocative so he can get his name in the paper and his face on television.
In mythology, the Medusa can petrify people with a look - which is a good thing, I think. But the Medusa is a unique symbol - something strong. It’s about going all the way.
In mythology, the Medusa can petrify people with a look - which is a good thing, I think. But the Medusa is a unique symbol - something strong. It's about going all the way.
The mathematician requires tact and good taste at every step of his work, and he has to learn to trust to his own instinct to distinguish between what is really worthy of his efforts and what is not...
It is often said that the Buddha's teaching is only a raft to help you cross the river, a finger pointing to the moon. Don't maistake the finger for the moon. The raft is not the shore. If we cling to the raft, if we cling to the finger, we miss everything. We cannot, in the name of the finger or the raft kill each other. Human life is more precious than any ideology, any doctrine.
He loves so wholly. It is his nature. He blinks, then tries to find the right response. "I-" he stumbles. "I'm so afraid, June. So afraid of what might happen to-" I put two fingers against his lips to hush him. "Fear makes you stronger," I whisper. Before I can stop myself, I put my hands on his face and press my mouth to his.
A female newcomer and a male newcomer will get paid different amounts of money. You're a newcomer, nobody knows who you are, man or woman doesn't matter. But you're going to get paid different money.
I feel engaged with young people in Pakistan. But that said, it's still a small minority that reads novels, literary fiction. But it isn't necessarily a small minority of the wealthy elite in the city of Lahore. It can often be and I often do meet at literary festivals students who've ridden a bus 12 hours from a very small town just to hear some of their favorite writers come and speak.
Dev Anand was extremely cooperative towards a newcomer. He never made me feel that he was a big star and I, a newcomer.
I am a newcomer. I want to remain a newcomer. That is my DNA.
What a joy it is to feel the soft, springy earth under my feet once more, to follow grassy roads that lead to ferny brooks where I can bathe my fingers in a cataract of rippling notes, or to clamber over a stone wall into green fields that tumble and roll and climb in riotous gladness!
My instinct was that it was Sidney's childhood in the Bahamas that gave him the fearlessness to fight racism. So this documentary was a kind of rounding out of what had begun in that scene in In the Heat of the Night.
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