A Quote by Paul Kane
Writing can be a very solitary business. It's you sat at a desk typing words into a computer. It can get lonely sometimes and lots of writers live quite isolated lives.
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Writers and musicians are very similar in that the chances of making a life in either field are so infinitesimal. And once you're in, the chances of staying viable are difficult. But there is something incredibly different about performing in front of a live audience, as opposed to sitting at your desk typing.
My desk is like a 'U,' so I have my computer and lots of dictionaries because I write in Spanish and I live in English.
Imagine you are writing an email. You are in front of the computer. You are operating the computer, clicking a mouse and typing on a keyboard, but the message will be sent to a human over the internet. So you are working before the computer, but with a human behind the computer.
Writing can be a very solitary profession, and when deadlines are looming, it's tempting to glue myself to my desk, but I try to make sure I get out a few times a month with friends just so I don't forget what it means to be social.
I used to type, but now, typing or working with a computer, I get a stiff neck. So I prefer writing longhand.
My friends in Paris are writers, or something like that, whereas my friends in New York are doing cool stuff in finance and living very different lives. In writing, it's pretty solitary, so it doesn't really matter who's around.
Writing, and especially writing a novel, where you get to sit in a room by yourself with either a pen and a paper or a computer for a couple of years, is a very solitary occupation. You can read sales figures - a hundred thousand books sold, half a million books sold - but they are just numbers.
Writing is a solitary endeavor, but not a lonely one. When you write, your world is populated by the characters you invent and you feel those people filling your lives.
I was having the surreal experience of having myself show myself around my office and bullpen.” “Oh! My desk. I could’ve sat at my desk. I could’ve sat at your desk.” “No.” “It’s a vid set.” “Even then, no.
There's something nearly mystical about certain words and phrases that float through our lives. It's computer mysticism. Words that are computer generated to be used on products that might be sold anywhere from Japan to Denmark - words devised to be pronounceable in a hundred languages. And when you detach one of these words from the product it was designed to serve, the words acquires a chantlike quality.
You have to remember that writing itself is so solitary. You start writing because you're lonely.
Whether you're acting or you're writing, your skin is just basically ripped off and you're putting yourself out there. At least the acting part comes with a bit more social interaction. And you're a bit less isolated because you are working with the director and the crew, and there's a general camaraderie. Writing, you're totally isolated. You're just trying to get the words on paper.
I'm always a great student of writers' work habits. Balzac sat at his desk dressed in a monk's robe, and he always had to have a rotten apple on his desk. The smell of the apple inspired him somehow.
Some people think that writers are innately solitary and that there's a kind of romance to that solitariness. I tend to think that what writers really want to do is get accepted into things. They want to get accepted into society, into culture, into intelligentsia, into the fun. Writing is their mechanism, their instrument, for doing that.
To me, writing and composing are much more like painting, about colors and brushes; I don't use a computer when I write, and I don't use a piano. I'm at a desk writing, and it's very broad strokes and notes as colors on a palette.
I worry very, very much about an isolated country. That's what makes me nervous. Russia lives in the world. China lives in the world. North Korea is a very, very strange country because it is so isolated, and I do feel that a nation with nuclear weapons, they have got to be dealt with. Dealt with effectively.
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