A Quote by Vladimir Nabokov
The writer's job is to get the main character up a tree, and then once they are up there, throw rocks at them.
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The main plot line is simple: Getting your character to the foot of the tree, getting him up the tree, and then figuring out how to get him down again.
You take a handful of rocks and put them in a jar. Then once a week, you take one tiny pebble out of the jar and throw it away. When the jar is empty, why, you'll just about be over your grief. ... Time alone will do if you're short on rocks.
When you fall, never get up without gaining anything. Always find something on the way up. If there are only rocks, grasp one to throw in order to defend yourself.
Someone once told me that children are like kites. You struggle just to get them in the air; they crash; you add a longer tail. Then they get caught in a tree; you climb up and bring them down, and untangle the string; you run to get them aloft again. Finally, the kite is airborne, and it flies higher and higher, as you let out more string, until it's so high in the sky, it looks like a bird. And if the string snaps, and you've done your job right, the kite will continue to soar in the wind, all by itself.
Now ballads, I can mess around and get up on somebody on a ballad. People ain't seen it yet, but I can mess around and get up in there. I've had Ruben Studdard up in my house, Brian McKnight, Tank. Every once in a while I throw down with them.
I don't get tired. I get beat up. You keep chopping on a tree, you need to give the tree some rest so the chlorophyll will fill back up and the tree gets its energy back.
I suppose the biggest strain was that Hoodwink is a high-octane character and he's up there like all the time. Once he's on his journey there's no let up for the man, so I actually found it a massively exhausting job to keep that level up.
The consciousness-expanding drugs - the hallucinogens, such as cannabis, mescaline, LSD, Psylocybin - I think are useful to a writer up to a certain point. That is, they open psychic areas that would not otherwise be available to the writer. But I feel that once these areas have been opened and the writer has reached them, he is able to get back there in the future without the drug.
I get the team set up good and then I'll let them do their thing. At the end of the day, if you put the time and effort into interviewing and finding the right people for a job, you've got to let them do that job.
As a writer I want everybody to get a chance to voice their opinions. If each character thinks that they're telling the truth, then it's valid. Then at the end of the film, I leave it up to the audience to decide who did the right thing.
The main thing is to be yourself and not allow people to disturb you to be different, because they want you to be different. You gotta be yourself. Many times you throw a mistake due to your own personality or your own character or from interference that you get along the way then you learn, and the main thing is to learn from your mistakes and get better.
He held my hand and told me a story about when he was six and threw a rock at a kid's head who was bullying his brother, and how after that no one had bothered either of them again. 'You have to stick up for yourself,' he told me. 'But it's bad to throw rocks,' I said. 'I know. You're smarter than me. You'll find something better than rocks.
God is not aloof. He is not disconnected. He says continually through the centuries, I’ll help you, I really will. When you don’t know where to turn, then turn to me. When you’re ready to throw up your hands - throw them up to me. Put your voice behind them too, and I’ll come and help you.
Its, the gum tree, main appeal to me has been its combination of mightiness and delicacy - mighty in its strength of limb and delicate in the colouring of its covering. Then it has distinctive qualities; in fact I know of no other tree which is more decorative, both as regards the flow of its limbs and the patterns the bark makes on its main trunk. In all its stages the gum tree is extremely beautiful.
If I wanted you to get a job, I would ask you to get a job. I'm also not stupid. I'm not going to overwork myself. If I have to chase the money, then I can't do this no more. That's not what I signed up for. I didn't sign up to tire myself out.
It's really a misconception to identify the writer with the main character, given that the author creates all the characters in the book. In certain ways, I'm every character. Then again, there is a huge gap between me as a person and what I do in the novel.
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