The notion of a universality of human experience is a confidence trick and the notion of a universality of female experience is a clever confidence trick.
When you're writing something new, writing something that's your own, basically you have nothing else to do except either invent a trick, use someone else's trick, or have no trick and get a bad performance.
I just keep working out. You can't stop. Everyone thinks there's a trick, but there's no trick! The trick is, you have to be consistent.
What's the trick to writing a genuinely funny comedy? The trick is therapy. Take notes.
What magical trick makes us intelligent? The trick is that there is no trick. The power of intelligence stems from our vast diversity, not from any single, perfect principle.
My trick is the trick that everyone knows: Work really hard and prepare.
You want the greatest trick for writing a novel? Here it is: imagine urgently whispering your story into one person's ear - and only one. This one visualization will clarify every word choice you make.
You can visualize, and you can try to trick yourself into thinking a certain way. There's all kinds of things you can do to try to get in the right spot mentally. But at the end of the day, to have real confidence, you've got to be doing good at your craft.
You must not lose confidence in God because you lost confidence in your pastor. If our confidence in God had to depend upon our confidence in any human person, we would be on shifting sand.
Somebody said that writers are like otters... Otters, if they do a trick and you give them a fish, the next time they'll do a better trick or a different trick because they'd already done that one. And writers tend to be otters. Most of us get pretty bored doing the same trick. We've done it, so let's do something different.
All fiction for me is a kind of magic and trickery, a confidence trick, trying to make people believe something is true that isn't.
Power is confidence. The confidence to deliver your answer when you're in a board meeting is what will allow you to move up faster. The confidence to be yourself in front of people creates a separation.
The whole trick is to make it feel like you're spying on real people's lives as they get through the day. When I'm writing, I have to trick myself as a writer. If I consciously say, 'I'm writing,' I feel all this pressure and somehow it doesn't feel as real as when it doesn't seem to count as much.
A bank is a confidence trick. If you put up the right signs, the wizards of finance themselves will come in and ask you to take their money.
Enthusiasm is my superpower. One might say that confidence yields the same result. I disagree. Confidence is about yourself, enthusiasm is about something else. Confidence is impressive, but enthusiasm is infectious. Confidence is serious, enthusiasm is fun.
Underlying the whole scheme of civilization is the confidence men have in each other, confidence in their integrity, confidence in their honesty, confidence in their future.