A Quote by Michael Chabon
Ideas are the easy part. I spend a lot of time batting them away, trying to keep them from distracting me from what I actually have to focus on and finish. A lot of times, they are a siren temptress beckoning me with the promise of a much shorter, simpler, more slender novel over the horizon, but of course that's very dangerous.
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I think a lot, so I don't spend a lot of time actually writing - I do that part very quickly. That helps, for me. To keep track of the characters.
I don't really think of these as projects. I think of them as bands. I have tried to not just convene a group of musicians and make one record or make one gig and just drop it. Each of them develop over time. I have been really fortunate to keep a band like the Sextet together over three very different albums. Each time, the goal got more deep for me in terms of how I wanted to write for those people. So it is really about trying to develop ideas and trying to have a consistent focus on a way to come up with new ideas in music that I want to do.
I actually had publishers that would encourage me at times to keep it simpler, not pack in so much information, but I'm a fan of songs and movies and books that the second time you read them, you find more stuff that you missed, so I like to pay attention to that detail.
I don't think I have enough of an interest in today's cultural mood to connect with or reject it. I'm compelled by the ideas that arrive when I'm not trying, and I follow them through almost every time. I feel fortunate that these days, there are a lot of them. You could argue that they are informed by everything I'm experiencing culturally around me but I don't, for example, look online for new music or art very often, and I don't think there is much in contemporary culture for me. It's a needle in a haystack kind of thing, and I'd rather spend that time working on a new song.
It would’ve been easier to die. It’s not that I want to be dead now. I don’t. I have a lot in my life that I get satisfaction from, that I love. But some days, especially in the beginning, it was so hard. And I couldn’t help but think that it would’ve been so much simpler to go with the rest of them. But you—you asked me to stay. You begged me to stay. You stood over me and you made a promise to me, as sacred as any vow.
The 'where' doesn't really matter for me. It's whenever I get time to spend with the people that I treasure the most in my life, that's when I am at my happiest. I don't get to see them as much anymore, so the times that we actually get to meet up and just hang out together mean a lot to me.
When I'm playing well because of my serve and trying to keep points shorter, I don't need to worry about my opponent. All I need to do is focus on myself and have them adjust to me rather than me adjust to them. That's when I play my best tennis.
There were a lot of players who gave me suggestions when I was young. At times, they were very good suggestions, and I took them seriously, applied them to my batting, and got success after that.
I would imagine that the more time you spend talking to another person, the more you're going to lie to them. So if you spend a lot of time with your relations, you're probably lying a lot to them.
A lot of times Mick will play me different things, or I'll listen to a cassette, and out of twenty ideas or whatever, I'll find two or three that are just blowing me away, and we'll start working on them right away.
I start a lot more songs than I finish, because I realize when I get into them, they're no good. I don't throw them away, I just put them away, store them, get them out of sight.
Rather than focus on trying to get a lot of customers to market yourself, really focus more on the actual product or service itself and existing users to, like, what would make them happier, what would make them come back more and more times or in our case buy more often.
A lot of groups spend their whole cultural and aesthetic identity trying to move away from Africa, which I think is a mistake. One of the reasons I love Cuba and cultures like that is because they're not trying to move away from their African roots, they're trying to embrace them. That's part of the culture.
When people are always telling you that you have to have a lot of women, women are very important, there's a chance that you might actually begin to observe them on a more fundamental level. Then you get so much focus that one day you might actually see. Dominican men are told to look at women all the time, but they're definitely not told to see them.
I do that a lot of authors still do not do is allow people to write directly to me. I get about 50 fan letters a day, and I answer every single one of them myself. It takes a lot of time and sometimes it's a pain in the neck and I answer the same questions over and over. But the truth is these people come to my readings clutching these letters saying, "You wrote me back. I can't believe you wrote me back", and I think it really means a lot for them to know that the author values them just as much as they value the author.
I've been extremely lucky in terms on injury. Very few injuries over the course of, this is the beginning of my 16th year. I know a lot of guys that have had a lot shorter careers and a lot more injuries, so I knock on wood every day.
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