A Quote by Tom T. Hall
I had the notion that I wanted to write the great dirty American novel, so I went to Roanoke College on the GI Bill.
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Marcelo Garcia is one of those fighters who trains with no-gi, and is also great with gi. When you train with no-gi you actually get better with gi too. I am spending all the time on no-gi, so it becomes a different animal.
People didn't know certain things about me, which... I was out of creative writing class in school, Syracuse University; had a B.A. in English and wanted to write the great American novel but I also loved rock and roll. I was in bar bands all through college, playing fraternities and have to know all the songs in the top 10. That kind of thing.
I went to college and law school with the help of the GI Bill. That experience moved me so much, I dedicated the rest of my life to serving this great country and helping others succeed.
It used to be that the highest ambition of American novelists was to write 'the Great American Novel,' that great white whale of American fiction that would encompass all the American experience in one great book.
My father was a frustrated writer. I think he wanted to write the great American novel.
All my friends who wanted to write had got nowhere trying to write the great European novel. So I deliberately steered clear of that and set out to write something story-led.
From about the age of 15 or 16 I'd had the notion that I wanted to write fiction, and I'd done enough in college to satisfy myself that I had a knack for it - I wouldn't call it "talent" - though I wondered if I'd ever have the guts to actually commit to it.
By the time I was doing "Kill Bill," it was so much filled with prose that, you know, I start seeing why people write a screenplay and make it more like a blueprint, because basically I had written - in "Kill Bill," I had basically written a novel, and basically every day I was adapting my novel to the screen on the fly, you know, on my feet.
Dreiser wanted to write the next great American novel, and his desperation pervades [ Sister Carrie ] like an unsavory pit stain.
I had zero interest in going to college. I used my GI Bill to help pay for training. I hated doing group projects or deal with people in the class who aren't paying attention. That made me go insane. I was looking for any way out. My sanity was fighting.
In America, we then made a commitment, particularly after World War II with the GI Bill, to massively expand our commitment to college education, and that meant we had more engineers and we had more scientists and that meant we had better technology, which meant that we were more productive and we could succeed in the global marketplace.
Since I cant write the greatest American novel, Im going to write the longest American novel.
At one point I would read nothing that was not by the great American Jews - Saul Bellow, Philip Roth - which had a disastrous effect of making me think I needed to write the next great Jewish American novel. As a ginger-haired child in the West of Ireland, that didn't work out very well, as you can imagine.
I was thinking about what I wanted to write next, after my first novel, and had decided that I wanted to write a story with a lot of strong female characters in it.
I always was interested in prose. As a teenager, I published short stories. And I always wanted to write the long short story, I wanted to write a novel. Now that I have attained, shall I say, a respectable age, and have had experiences, I feel much more interested in prose, in the novel. I feel that in a novel, for example, you can get in toothbrushes and all the paraphernalia that one finds in dally life, and I find this more difficult in poetry.
Since I can't write the greatest American novel, I'm going to write the longest American novel.
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