A Quote by Paula Hawkins

My idea of fun is to sit looking at a blank wall in a cottage, making up stories in utter silence. The thought of going back to work in an office is horrendous. — © Paula Hawkins
My idea of fun is to sit looking at a blank wall in a cottage, making up stories in utter silence. The thought of going back to work in an office is horrendous.
My life is routine. I wake up early in the morning. I brush my teeth. I sit on the floor of the cell I do not go to breakfast. I stare at a gray cement wall. I keep my legs crossed my back straight my eyes forward. I take deep breaths in and out, in and out, and I try not to move. I sit for as long as I can I sit until everything hurts I sit until everything stops hurting I sit until I lose myself in the gray wall I sit until my mind becomes as blank as the gray wall. I sit and I stare and I breathe. I sit and I stare. I breathe.
What really matters is the work. And what matters to me is doing the work. I'm not looking at the back end: "What am I going to get out of this? What's going to be the reward?" I'm just looking at the work, the pleasure of being able to do the work. And that's what the fun is: To climb up the mountain is the fun, not standing at the top. There's nowhere to go. But climbing up, that struggle, that to me is where the fun is. That to me is the thrill. But once that's over, that's kind of it. I don't look too much beyond that.
Well, I’ve had my fun; I’ve had it, he thought, looking up at the swinging baskets of pale geraniums. And it was smashed to atoms—his fun, for it was half made up, as he knew very well; invented, this escapade with the girl; made up, as one makes up the better part of life, he thought—making onself up; making her up; creating an exquisite amusement, and something more. But odd it was, and quite true; all this one could never share—it smashed to atoms.
You wind up creating from silence, like painting a picture on a blank canvas that could bring tears to somebody's eyes. As songwriters, our blank canvas is silence. Then we write a song from an idea that can change somebody's life. Songwriting is the closest thing to magic that we could ever experience. That's why I love songwriting.
I never, ever have seen media this way. It's almost indescribable. Making up stories, refusing to run real stories. It's making themselves look like utter fools. There's no journalism, there is no media. There's pure, full-fledged advocacy here.
It was a life with purpose. And it was also a lot of fun. Fishing is fun. Hiking up mountains is fun. Building a wall out of river rocks dug up from the bottom of a glacial lake is not fun. Not at all. But it does give a work ethic that you can take anywhere in the world.
I fell off a wall in Cockermouth when I was 18. The slate on the top of the wall was loose and I tried to jump up and sit on it. I ended up falling backwards and the tile ended up falling back onto my hand.
Mexico is not going to build it [a wall], we're going to build it. And it's going to be a serious wall. It's not going to be a toy wall like we have right now where cars and trucks drive over it loaded up with drugs and they sell the drugs in our country and then they go back and, you know, we get the drugs, they get the cash, okay, and that's not going to happen.
In my office, we were talking about the fact that they'd announced a remake of 'A Star is Born,' and I was bemoaning the idea of a fourth remake. And the young guys who work in my office were giving me blank looks, like, 'What's 'A Star is Born?'
We always joke now like, you know, the more experienced we get making stuff, we're like, "Never leave set without a shot of each of our lead characters driving in the car looking happy, looking moderately blank and looking sad." Because we know we're going to need these things.
I think everyone at some point comes up against a wall. Curiously, though, if you continue working, you might readdress that idea from another direction. If you didn't try something, you'd never have anything; if you didn't make an attempt to make the work, it wouldn't exist. There have been times when I could not work, and I would just go and sit down in the studio and wait to see what might happen. You can't always just go and take an exotic trip and come back and make something.
Occupy Wall Street means making Wall Street and the corporate power elite understand that the people affected by the binge of unregulated greed are not going away, and they are not going to give up.
A Muslim student came by the office and asked why I did not have anything on my wall about the Koran. My response was clear, 'As long as I have the honor of representing the citizens of the 5th District of Virginia in the United States House of Representatives, the Koran is not going to be on the wall of my office.'
It doesn't feel like work. Yes, I have days that are difficult, but I'm sitting in a chair making up stories. It's what I did for fun as a kid, whether with Barbies or stuffed animals.
I know it feels like two steps forward and one step back, but we are making progress. In my lifetime, I have lived through one World War, I have lived through the end of Apartheid in South Africa, the pulling down of the Berlin Wall. I have experienced what I never thought I would have experienced, which is a pretty workable peace in Northern Ireland, and I experienced a unified Europe - until the Conservative government got its hands on the idea that in order to appease a few back-benchers they would hold a referendum, what a disastrous idea.
I had soaked up all of these ideas about what it meant to be a creative person from media and culture. And I had this idea in my head that if this was your calling it was supposed to be fun. It was supposed to feel good to wrestle with a blank page. And imagine my surprise when it wasn't fun at all.
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