A Quote by Nick Hornby
I like writing about popular culture. It helps to place people. I think you can be really, really accurate if you know enough about it, and place people precisely.
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We're so immaturely cynical as a culture. We're not wise enough to look at an institution like marriage and to really things about what it means and what it signifies. It signifies a place where people can tie the ropes of their lives together so that they're stronger. It signifies a place where people can tell the truth to one another.
There are many people who live in what I call 'No-man's Land,' a place where you're not really happy, but you're not unhappy enough to do anything about it. That's a dangerous place. It's a place where people numb themselves to their dreams. It's where they dismiss hope and accept what's in front of them instead of driving toward what they really want in life.
For me, when I'm writing something really personal, I don't feel good about it. It's weird that people can connect to it and like something that came from a really crap place. You have to be quite brave to write about something that you honestly feel and think.
There's a great joy in writing about a place you know very well, but there's also a lot of responsibility in trying to be accurate. It's a lot like writing about a relative: you can see both their strengths and their shortcomings, and even as you want to be honest, you want people to see the good that's there as well.
I think we really need a movement to drive how popular culture understands the issues that feminists care about. When I think about the LGBT movement for example, they have had a really intentional strategy to try to change images and representation of LGBT people in the media and the culture. It really moved the dial politically. That's what is needed in the women's movement - a strategy that can drive awareness and culture change.
Club culture is always going to be a reflection of youth culture, but I think we're maybe moving into a time when the club is a place where older people can go, too. And it's a place people go to connect to themselves, it's not always about the party. It's also about letting off steam and expressing yourself and connecting to other people.
I think there ought to be some serious discussion by smart people, really smart people, about whether or not proliferation of things like The Smoking Gun and TMZ and YouTube and the whole celebrity culture is healthy. We've switched from a culture that was interested in manufacturing, economics, politics - trying to play a serious part in the world - to a culture that's really entertainment-based. I mean, I know people who can tell you who won the last four seasons on American Idol and they don't know who their [bleeping] Representatives are.
I know is that the response [for Difficult People ] has been really great. I think it's for smart people. I think it's for people who obviously care about pop culture or know about it, even if it's to a fault. I think it's for outsiders.
All great spirituality teaches about letting go of what you don’t need and who you are not. Then, when you can get little enough and naked enough and poor enough, you’ll find that the little place where you really are is ironically more than enough and is all that you need. At that place, you will have nothing to prove to anybody and nothing to protect. That place is called freedom. It’s the freedom of the children of God. Such people can connect with everybody. They don’t feel the need to eliminate anybody . . .
It's a funny thing, I think people meet us and they assume that we know a lot more about politics than we actually do. People will really get into it. I'm like, I don't really know a lot about tariff reform or export trade reform. That's really not something I know about.
Whereas if you're a reader, you can enter other people's minds, you can be in direct contact with people who may have lived hundreds or thousands of years ago. You can know what's like to be old if you're young or young if you're old. You can know what it's like to live in a completely different culture and really enter somebody else's mind. There's no amount of historical information that can give you access to the consciousness of a person from another culture or from the past in the way that reading really good novel from that place or time can.
When you write a song about a place, you are writing a song about a place that might be in a hundred years, or a place that has been, or that was - in your imagination. I think that also embodies the American spirit. You are looking for what you can call "a place."
CBT is really a miracle. I've seen it help a lot of people, and one of the reasons I'm speaking out is that I don't feel like enough people know it. Through my work, I constantly come across other people who have various forms of anxiety or panic - it's much more common, I think, than people realize - and not all of them even really know about CBT.
In 2008, when I was wrapped up a very toxic relationship, I lived out of my car for about four months to get away. And what I learned about myself in the process is that sometimes a safety net isn't really that safe; it's what keeps you from flying. That year I went from playing football to being a football player. Football wasn't paying my bills, but people didn't really know how bad it was. That was the one place in the world that when everything else was chaos, I could be great. I think we all have that place where we experience greatness. Football definitely saved my life.
It's strange. No one ever really talked to me about my voice. People started writing about it, and I was like, 'What?' I'm really about my lyrics, but more people were talking about my voice. It's cool, but at first I got upset because I wanted people to focus on the content.
I know some people are like "I'm depressed and I'm a struggling artist" and that really works for some people, but that doesn't work for me. I have to be really happy, even when I'm writing my depressing songs; I have to come through that stage before I can write. I have to be in a good place. I'm a positive person.
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