A Quote by Nicholson Baker
One's head is finite. You pour more and more things into it - surnames, chronologies, affiliations - and it packs them away in its tunnels, and eventually you find that you have a book about something that you publish.
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If you think success is about so many more things and is so much more arbitrary, then you can be much more open to the idea that you can be Ben Fountain and publish your great book at forty-nine.
I just submitted what I had to the 'Octopus Books' contest open reading period, and they said they wanted to publish my poetry book. Then I started to publish more and more poetry because people would ask me to do readings or ask me submit something for their journal.
Honestly, with stats and things like that, I try not to think about them. I just find that the more you think about goals and assists - what you need to do and accomplish - the more you tend to fall short. When you hope for something and you want something, it comes to you.
One of the few things I know about writing is this: spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book, or for another book; give it, give it all, give it now. . . . Something more will arise for later, something better. These things fill from behind, from beneath, like well water. Similarly, the impulse to keep to yourself what you have learned is not only shameful, it is destructive. Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you. You open your safe and find ashes.
You and me will read a book and find three interesting things that we remember. But Colin finds everything intriguing. He reads a book about presidents and he remembers more of it because everything he reads clicks in his head as fugging interesting.
When I'm writing for a book, it's much more reflective process. I have certain things that may not translate well to the stage, but, when they're on the page, people can really get into them. My first two books were aiming to be funnier, but the third was more about deep exploration. Things about being a parent and growing older that I thought would be perfect for a book.
You can keep counting forever. The answer is infinity. But, quite frankly, I don't think I ever liked it. I always found something repulsive about it. I prefer finite mathematics much more than infinite mathematics. I think that it is much more natural, much more appealing and the theory is much more beautiful. It is very concrete. It is something that you can touch and something you can feel and something to relate to. Infinity mathematics, to me, is something that is meaningless, because it is abstract nonsense.
In South Korea, some 20 million people share just five surnames. Every one of Denmark's top 20 surnames ends in '-sen,' meaning 'son of,' a pattern that is replicated across Scandinavia. British surnames have never favoured such neatness, and we can be grateful for that.
If someone's going to publish a book about addiction, it has to say something new and different. It has to be something we haven't read before. A lot of these books are published because the writing is wonderful. The Frey book has superb writing, and that can be enough to sell a book.
Some writers, I'm told, look for their characters' surnames in telephone directories. I don't - it seems too obvious. Or too deliberate: if you go looking for names, you're bound to find them, of course, but I've always had a superstitious hunch that the names you find by accident are always going to be better and more satisfying somehow.
Vision is about more than just getting things done, accomplishing some task, achieving something; it is about discovering and expanding our view of others, affirming them, believing in them, and helping them discover and realize the potential within them-helping them find their own voice.
You can always tell when something is good, because the studio senses it has something good, and you can see them pour more and more resources into it. The promotion gets bigger and bigger.
I think I write or publish as much as I do because I can bear being without a book to work on. But routinely when I finish a book, I think, "What will I do? Where will I get an idea?" And a kind of low-level panic sets in. And then eventually something happens. I don't know. If I knew how it happened I would repeat the process, but I don't know - something just occurs to me.
If you buy a book on golf instruction buy the thinnest book you can find. The thinner the book, chances are the easier and more elementary the instruction. It can do one of two things: help you more or hurt you less. Both are good compared to the alternative.
I think people are much more concerned about money now. There aren't the big advances of the past. You feel the sense of nervousness about the book industry. It's not like before. Not that I knew very much about what it was like because I was a newcomer to it, but I get that feeling that people are more conservative in their book choices and what they are going to publish and what's a sure sell. As opposed to - just like in the economy - a sense of luxury and sense of risk taking ten years ago.
As I get older I find myself thinking about stories more and more before I work so that by the time I eventually sit down to write them, I know more or less how it's going to look, start or feel. Once I do actually set pencil to paper, though, everything changes and I end up erasing, redrawing and rewriting more than I keep. Once a picture is on the page I think of about ten things that never would have occurred to me otherwise. Then when I think of the strip at other odd times during the day, it's a completely different thing than it was before I started.
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