A Quote by Courtney A. Kemp
I worked at 'Mademoiselle,' and then it shut, and I worked at 'GQ' for three years, during which I was freelancing. I wrote for 'Vibe.' I did music reviews. I wrote for 'Time Out.' I was desperate to get into 'Entertainment Weekly' or 'New York Magazine.' Like, desperate.
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In New York, everyone's desperate for success, desperate for money and desperate to be accepted, but in London they're more laid back about things like that.
Football is based on desperation. All clubs are desperate in one form or another - desperate to succeed, desperate to survive, desperate to stay where they are, desperate that things get no worse, desperate to arrest the slide.
I wrote for a weekly magazine and then edited a literary magazine, but I did not really feel comfortable with the profession of journalism itself
I wrote for a weekly magazine and then edited a literary magazine, but I did not really feel comfortable with the profession of journalism itself.
For the first few years I wrote jokes and performed them word for word and then wrote tags for them and did that word for word and that worked pretty well. Now, I do almost all of my writing on stage and then record and listen for any new things and then I write those down.
My 20s were all about feeling desperate. Desperate to find a new boyfriend. Desperate to get the perfect job. Desperate to get rid of this terrible relationship with this bad new boyfriend.
I grew up in Connecticut, going in and out of New York City, and I worked in the city in the '90s. I was freelancing for the Associated Press, and I fell in love with New York.
I worked at the original Coyote Ugly bar when I was a young, unpublished writer. Then later when I became a writer, I wrote an article about it for GQ. Disney read this article about this filthy, disgusting pit in the East Village [of New York City], where we used to set the bar on fire to get customers away from us, and said, "That's a great movie for kids!" They made the fantastic Coyote Ugly movie, now legendary.
You know what I did after I wrote my first novel? I shut up and wrote twenty-three more.
I did not go to fashion school. I arrived in New York in 1986 from Kansas City and was working as accessories editor for Mademoiselle Magazine. While working at Mademoiselle I noticed that the market lacked stylish and sensible handbags, so I decided to create my own.
I had written a novel that was more of a classic linear novel, and I worked on it and worked on it for years, and it always seemed like it wouldn't catch fire. At a certain point I just scrapped it all, and I kept maybe 15 percent of it, and I wrote those parts out on note cards.
When I wrote my first film and then directed it and I looked at it for the first time on what's called an assembly, you look at this movie which is every scene you wrote, every line of dialogue you wrote and you want to kill yourself the minute you see it. It's like, 'How did I write something so horrible?'
In 2003, I wrote a New York Times best-seller called 'Shut Up & Sing,' in which I criticized celebrities like the Dixie Chicks & Barbra Streisand who were trashing then-President George W. Bush. I have used a variation of that title for more than 15 years to respond to performers who sound off on politics.
'Desperate Housewives' worked out beautifully. I went out for that before it began airing, and no one had any idea it was going to turn into what it did.
When I was fifteen I wrote seven hundred pages of an incredibly bad novel - it's a very funny book I still like a lot. Then, when I was nineteen I wrote a couple hundred pages of another novel, which wasn't very good either. I was still determined to be a writer. And since I was a writer, and here I was twenty-nine years old and I wasn't a very good poet and I wasn't a very good novelist, I thought I would try writing a play, which seems to have worked out a little better.
I worked as a teacher in the public school system in New York City for several years, and I was a victim of the layoffs, you know, in the mid-'70s. And then I worked as a sales engineer for a company in New Jersey that was selling industrial filtration equipment.
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