A Quote by Pico Iyer

If we do away with semi-colons, parentheses and much else, we will lose all music, nuance and subtlety in communication - and end up shouting at one another in block capitals.
Because, if one is writing novels today, concentrating on the beauty of the prose is right up there with concentrating on your semi-colons, for wasted effort.
Semi-colons only prove that the author has been to college.
I like commas. I detest semi-colons — I don’t think they belong in a story. And I gave up quotation marks long ago. I found I didn’t need them, they were fly-specks on the page.
I like commas. I detest semi-colons - I don't think they belong in a story. And I gave up quotation marks long ago. I found I didn't need them, they were fly-specks on the page.
I heard Little Richard and Jerry Lee Lewis, and that was it. I didn't ever want to be anything else. I just started banging away and semi-studied classical music at the Royal Academy of Music but sort of half-heartedly.
You can achieve one thing, but because of that, you have to adapt or lose something else. If you end up in a relationship, you sometimes have to lose the closeness of your friendships, for example, or you have to move away somewhere... For me, that creates the sense of melancholy which I think exists in most people's lives.
I'm a writer; I like to retain subtlety and nuance.
With music, you're laying it all out there. They're judging you right away, and you can lose them quick. With the comedy, you've always got another joke to redeem yourself. Or, even if you've only got one joke, at least the punch line is at the end. Then they have to at least pay attention until the end.
I’ve had unsatisfying experiences, but mostly it’s about communication, which is why I make an effort to talk to the director beforehand to make sure we see eye-to-eye as creative individuals. If [good] communication isn’t present, you can lose something and end up very unhappy.
To pull off successful attacks in debates, you have to execute with nuance and subtlety. It has to be artful.
Our growing ability to eliminate the slow-moving aspects of entertainment and go hopping from one peak to another is not without cost. Stand-up comics, movie-makers and others who earn their living entertaining no longer "waste" time with setups and plot development, lest we reach for the remote and click them off our screen. The result is a loss of subtlety, anticipation and nuance and, in the process, a coarsening of our discourse.
I grew up in Harlem, a block away from what was then the most crowded block in New York City, according to the 1950 census. Something like ten thousand people lived in one city block.
Someone else's vision will never be as good as your own vision of your self. Live and die with it 'cause in the end it's all you have. Lose it and you lose yourself and everything else. I should have listened to myself.
I'm just used to having so much control in music and in acting you have to give that up a bit. Sure, our voices are heard on set, but at the end of the day you can lose an argument. Whereas in music, if I feel the second verse needs to be changed I can change it. I find it really hard as an artist to give up some of that control.
It is so important for us to have faith, trust, confidence in one another. It is the only way we can communicate. Without faith there is no communication, there is no love, or if there was a little love it will die without hope, trust, and confidence. Even if it doesn't die right away, it will be so ill, so weak, and so tired that communication will be miserable as well.
There's the conventional wisdom, of which I have none, where you get a record deal, you get a publicist, you get a campaign, and you do the tour, but none of that adds up to things like nuance and subtlety and dynamic.
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