A Quote by Philip Roth
Writing turns you into somebody who's always wrong. the illusion that you may get it right someday is the perversity that draws you on. What else could? As pathological phenomena go, it doesn't completely wreck your life.
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When I started writing seriously, I made the major discovery of my life - that I am right and everybody else is wrong if they disagree with me. What a great thing to learn: Don't listen to anyone else, and always go your own way.
One of the things that draws writers to writing is that they can get things right that they got wrong in real life by writing about them.
The illusion of the seventh veil was the illusion that you could get somebody else to do it for you. To think for you. To hang on your cross. The priest, the rabbi, the imam, the swami, the philosophical novelist were traffic cops, at best. They might direct you through a busy intersection, but they wouldn't follow you home and park your car.
If you want to be Justin Timberlake, go for it. But if you want to be somebody else, go for it but it's usually very hard. You just got to believe in yourself, work hard. I've no advice, I did everything the right and wrong way. You make it up as you go along, but it has to be in your blood stream and it's not a job. It's a way of life.
Art is interesting because there can be so many different perspectives in a piece of art. The way I see it may be completely different than the way somebody else sees it. It's interesting to hear what somebody sees in a piece of art compared to somebody else. It could be completely different, and that's interesting to me.
My feeling is that writing is, for me, a pathological condition. That could sound like a mystical experience, and it may be a mystical experience, but I have learnt just to go with it.
Everyone always tells you that you're the only one that can do this or that role right, and if you say no, they go to somebody else and tell them that they're the only one that can do it right. But when they're talking to you, you're always the 'Best Actor of Your Generation.'
The Greek tragedies and comedies are like a roadmap to all the ways in which trying to live this rich, full life can go wrong. You could get into a war. You could find that you have members of your family on the wrong side of a political crisis. You could be raped. You could find that your child has gone crazy because of some horrible experience she's had.
I always say, "If you see something is wrong in your neighborhood, go ahead and change it. Don't wait for somebody else to do it." This is pretty much what I do.
Looks alone won’t get you that far. It may get you in the door, but there’s always somebody younger, somebody prettier. You have to rely on something else.
What annoys me about it is that your fate is always in somebody else's hands. It's always up to somebody else to decide whether or not they want you in their show and so the majority of actors have to play out a waiting game. The constant fear is that it could all end tomorrow.
And you don't have to be a preacher to carry on. That's why I've gone into the theater, with my mother's blessings, and someday I may write, produce and act in my own story of daddy's life. There are so many sides to his story. I hope that someday I could get that opportunity.
In real life, a relationship takes a long time. Either somebody is involved with somebody else, and that's ending, or somebody's hung up on an ex, or your job isn't going right, and so you're focused more on that than relationships. It just takes a lot for two people to get together.
I said that I thought the secret of life was obvious: be here now, love as if your whole life depended on it, find your life's work, and try to get hold of a giant panda. If you had a giant panda in your back yard, anything could go wrong — someone could die, or stop loving you, or you could get sick — and if you could look outside and see this adorable, ridiculous, boffo panda, you'd start to laugh; you'd be so filled with thankfulness and amusement that everything would be O.K. again.
You really get a feeling, when you're reading scripts, pretty quickly. Within 20 or 25 pages, you can get a sense of the part. I always think about whether I'm right for it and whether I can do it. If I don't think I'm right for it, it should go to somebody else.
I've always felt that God, himself, has chosen me for his purpose, for higher callings whether it's to be an inspiration to somebody else's life, whether it's to change somebody else's life, or whether it's to be that support or light in somebody else's life.
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