A Quote by Leslie Jamison
Whenever I've been stuck on a project, it's always brought me solace to the return to books that moved me in the past. It's a nice way to get outside my own head; and it brings me back to one of the most important reasons I write at all: to bring some pleasure to readers, to make them think or feel.
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Most of the time I've worked with directors who write their own scripts. The story is more important to me than the part. The project of the film has always been more important to me.
Blogging has mostly been an opportunity to react more immediately to experiences to try out ideas that I may end up using in the print media or in some other place. When I write books, it's a way for me to bring readers into the experience of writing the book, all through the process of writing the books that I write. I talk about what I'm up to in the blog. I let people know what I am doing. To me, it's just part of putting my professional life up in a way that people who are interested in it can access; and learning things from them as well.
Dollars damn me; and the malicious Devil is forever grinning in upon me, holding the door ajar. ... What I feel most moved to write, that is banned - it will not pay. Yet, altogether, write the other way I cannot. So the product is a final hash, and all my books are botches.
I find with most of my readers are kind of like me, sort of people who were a little bit naive in life and then learned the hard way that this is what's going on, the political games and most of my readers write to me telling me that the book helped them open their eyes to what other people are doing to them.
Whenever I feel like I'm getting too far away from where I need to be, I think about my sons and the legacy I have to leave for them - and it always brings me back to reality.
I think books find their way to you when you need them. Whenever I feel like I'm not going to live to read all the books I want to read, I remind myself that the important ones find their way to me.
Off the top of my head, I can't really think of anyone who really took me under their wing. You get advice from everyone. Kate Moss once said to me, "Don't worry about the past, just keep going." That has always sort of stuck with me.
Sometimes I feel that I am destined always to be offstage whenever the main action occurs. That God has made me the victim of some cosmic practical joke, by assigning me little more than a walk-on part in my own life. Or sometimes I feel that my role is simply to be a spectator to other people's stories, and always to wander away at the most important moment, drifiting into the kitchen to make a cup of tea just as the denouement unfolds.
The music brings me confidence and freedom. It's also the thing that can make me feel the most vulnerable. Once I finish writing all the songs for an album, once I actually record them, that whole process is usually easy and enjoyable. The part where I feel the most vulnerable is when it's all finished, I can make no more changes, I've turned it in, and there's no going back. All of a sudden I hear the songs in a different way; that's when I feel vulnerable.
It is no defense of superstition and pseudoscience to say that it brings solace and comfort to people. . . . If solace and comfort are how we judge the worth of something, then consider that tobacco brings solace and comfort to smokers; alcohol brings it to drinkers; drugs of all kinds bring it to addicts; the fall of cards and the run of horses bring it to gamblers; cruelty and violence bring it to sociopaths. Judge by solace and comfort only and there is no behavior we ought to interfere with.
I think it's really important that we get an experienced staff. Guys that have been a head coach, to me, at some level is important to me. I value head coaching just because it's good to know what it's like to be the decision maker.
Narratives have the same power, I think. Some readers of my novels ask me, "Why do you understand me?". That's a huge pleasure of mine because it means that readers and I can make our narratives relative.
Physics filled me with awe, put me in touch with a sense of original causes. Physics brought me closer to God. That feeling stayed with me throughout my years in science. Whenever one of my students came to me with a scientific project, I asked only one question, 'Will it bring you nearer to God?'
I, myself, write to change my life, to make it come out the way I want it to. But other people write for other reasons: to see more closely what it is they are thinking about, what they may be afraid of. Sometimes writers write to solve a problem, to answer their own question. All these reasons are good reasons. And that is the most important thing I'll ever tell you. Maybe it is the most important thing you'll ever hear. Ever.
I do write about thinkers. And that's what I love about reading. My favorite books, the ones that made me sit there for days, weeks, months, years, and pop back into my head - they make me think a lot.
I write to relieve an intellectual itch. I stumble across a hitherto neglected set of events, transformations, characters, or source materials from the past, and they nag at me until I make sense of them in words. But I also write to seduce and to make my readers think.
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