A Quote by Paul Fleischman

I should tell you that many people think that authors just cut and paste from real life into books. It doesn't work quite that way. — © Paul Fleischman
I should tell you that many people think that authors just cut and paste from real life into books. It doesn't work quite that way.
We are a cut-and-paste culture. The aim of the protectionists is to argue that a cut-and-paste culture is criminal. Well, it's only criminal if there's nothing out there that you can freely cut and paste. If we increasingly mark material as available for these non-commercial uses, then people will have the opportunity to see its importance.
You see so many movies... the younger people who are coming from MTV or who are coming from commercials and there's no sense of film grammar. There's no real sense of how to tell a story visually. It's just cut, cut, cut, cut, cut, you know, which is pretty easy.
You can tell a book is real when your heart beats faster. Real books make you sweat. Cry, if no one is looking. Real books help you make sense of your crazy life. Real books tell it true, don't hold back and make you stronger. But most of all, real books give you hope. Because it's not always going to be like this and books-the good ones, the ones-show you how to make it better. Now.
People would react to books by authors like James and Austen almost on a gut level. I think it was not so much the message, because the best authors do not have obvious messages. These authors were disturbing to my students because of their perspectives on life.
I train like I'm training for the Olympics or for a Mr. America contest, the way I've always trained my whole life. You see, life is a battlefield. Life is survival of the fittest... How many healthy people do you know? How many happy people do you know? Think about it. People work at dying, they don't work at living. My workout is my obligation to life. It's my tranquilizer. It's part of the way I tell the truth--and telling the truth is what's kept me going all these years.
I can only tell you one thing that I do know for sure, I am a dreamer. There are not many people that will recognize or want to recognize the fact that they are dreamers in their own life ... I continue to get up in the morning,enthusiastically, and go pick up a golf club with a thought that I can somewhere find that secret to making the cut. That's just an example, but it applies to other things in life, too, and that's the way I live and the way I think and the way I feel.
Are my characters copies of people in real life? ... Don't ever believe the stories about authors putting people into novels. That idea is a kind of joke on both authors and readers. All the readers believe that authors do it. All the authors know that it can't be done.
I get hundreds of emails daily and a lot of feedback from people that are reading or have read my books. When I'm writing, or in my daily life, I just think of the work. I love to tell a story, but I might work with a story to make it the best I can without thinking of how many people will read it or if it will influence anybody.
I think there are so many books out there written on relationships and romance that women are the authors of. How can women know exactly how men think? And there are so many guys out there with relationship books who are just not telling the truth. They have shaded parts.
But it's never just been the journals that have made the difference, I don't think. It's also the way the students are with one another . . . the way they talk about books and authors and themselves. Not just their problems, but their passions too. The way they form a little society and discuss whatever matters to them. Books light the fire-whether it's a book that's already written, or an empty journal that needs to be filled in.
Paste magazine has served as a tremendous window into culture for my house. I can think of no other publication that provides such critical yet entertaining thoughts on music, movies, books and gaming as Paste. My mailbox would be a dark place indeed without it.
There are some really great books that have been written about slavery, but I don't think that the discourse about it in society has been very accurate or healthy. I don't think we've come up with ways to tell it that don't insult people or hit them in the wrong way. Part of the problem is that most people don't really understand what slavery was anyway. Most white people didn't own slaves. Slavery was a way of life, just like driving cars is a way of life now. It doesn't mean that it was right.
I would give anything if it went back to analog age. I mean, music was so real, and you had to sing everything on a record; you had to play everything on a record. There was no cut-and-paste - you couldn't get the chorus right one time and then paste it every other time; you really had to be good at what you did.
When I'm editing, I tend to cut, go back over it, cut, go back over it, cut, so by the time I'm done, even with a cut, I don't have a rough cut and then work on it so much. I have a pretty rigorous cut of the movie that's usually in the range of what the final movie is going to be. It doesn't mean I don't work on it a lot after that, but I get it into a shape so I feel I can really tell what it needs, or at least it's ready to show people.
When you want to be a writer, you think that actually getting published will make you feel somehow more real to yourself. But it doesn't. And nor should it. If publication is the pole around which your entire identity pivots, you're in big trouble. I'd also add that many wonderful books by brilliant authors get ignored or overlooked, and that poor sales aren't (necessarily) a measure of your abilities.
Being a pastor, of course, obviously people would say it (shouldn't) have done much but, boy, it sure gave me a peace I never had before. I think we struggle in life. Even people of faith struggle when things don't work out quite the way we think they should.
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