A Quote by Jose Saramago
Being fired was the best luck of my life. It made me stop and reflect. It was the birth of my life as a writer.
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My best experience as a writer was working with Michael Ondaatje. He let me dismantle his novel, reimagine it, and still had dinner with me and gave me good notes. But the best thing about writing has been the writer's life, the sense of being expressed, the ownership of the day, the entirely specious sense of freedom we have, however slave we are to some boss or other. I wouldn't trade it for any other life.
I didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.
I was fired from my own television show, CBS's Family Law. It was the second time this had happened in my career, the first being when I was fired from The Facts of Life. I had been grateful to work in TV for so long but had always been chasing a career as a feature writer-director and had completely failed.
Life is an opportunity, benefit from it. Life is beauty, admire it. Life is a dream, realize it. Life is a challenge, meet it. Life is a duty, complete it. Life is a game, play it. Life is a promise, fulfill it. Life is sorrow, overcome it. Life is a song, sing it. Life is a struggle, accept it. Life is a tragedy, confront it. Life is an adventure, dare it. Life is luck, make it. Life is too precious, do not destroy it. Life is life, fight for it.
I do think that the birth of my daughter was sort of a rebirth for me. It made me look at life in a completely new way. And that made me appreciate life in a way I don't think I ever had before.
Nothing about my life is lucky. Nothing. A lot of grace, a lot of blessings, a lot of divine order, but I don't believe in luck. For me, luck is preparation meeting the moment of opportunity. There is no luck without you being prepared to handle that moment of opportunity. Every single thing that has ever happened in your life is preparing you for the moment that is to come.
I try my best, but at the same time, I try not to let being out with someone affect my everyday life. Like, if I want to go out and grab a smoothie with a friend who's a male, I'm not gonna let the paparazzi stop me from doing that and living my life and just being a normal person.
I had as yet no notion that life every now and then becomes literature—not for long, of course, but long enough to be what we best remember, and often enough so that what we eventually come to mean by life are those moments when life, instead of going sideways, backwards, forward, or nowhere at all, lines out straight, tense and inevitable, with a complication, climax, and, given some luck, a purgation, as if life had been made and not happened.
I feel I'd like to share my luck and my life. Being in love is the best thing in the world.
Birth into this life was the death of the embryo life that preceded; and the death of this will be birth into some new mode of being.
No matter what...ball made my heart beat faster, made me want to jump up and down and be Superman. That's what life was about anyway, being Superman and living like life itself was important. Basketball made my life important.
I'll wager there isn't a human being on earth who doesn't believe in luck, however rational they pretend to be in public life. In reality, most of human life is luck - and, of course, its darker, more prevalent opposite. One only has to live long enough to experience both.
I think the biggest advice I can offer is don't just pick one story and stop, write as much as you can, as many stories as you can. The best thing about being a writer is, a writer's craft is nearly perfect because a writer can go anywhere and do his craft.
I would like to mention some preparations that were required of me. The first preparation is to take a right attitude toward life. This means, stop being an escapist! Stop being a surface liver who stays right in the froth of the surface. There are millions of these people, and they never find anything really worthwhile. Be willing to face life squarely and get down beneath the surface of life where the verities and realities are to be found. That's what we are doing here now.
From the moment I wrote 'Leaf Storm' I realized I wanted to be a writer and that nobody could stop me and that the only thing left for me to do was to try to be the best writer in the world.
My wish and hope, every year, is that people's life chances - their chances of having a happy, prosperous, healthy life for themselves and their family and friends - should not depend on accident of birth. It shouldn't depend on where you're born. It should depend on who you are and what you do. But it shouldn't depend on the chance and the luck of being born in the U.S. or in a poor village in Sub-Saharan Africa or India or wherever it may be.
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