Sometimes people say a song made them cry when they mean a song let them cry.
Michael McKean
gif via Emma Darvick
‘Sometimes people say a song made them cry when they mean a song let them cry’
Category: Quotes
Deceiving GPS đ
âThe map is not the territory.â
Alfred Korzybski
‘Tip the world over on its side, and everything loose will land in Los Angeles’
âTip the world over on its side, and everything loose will land in Los Angeles.âÂ
Frank Lloyd Wright
‘The most effective way to do it – is to do it’
‘If you donât like how things are, change it! Youâre not a tree.’
Accept advice
Itâs one of my theories that when people give you advice, theyâre really just talking to themselves in the past.Â
Steve GarguiloÂ
My advice is to be wary of any advice. You can also take this advice and throw it away.Â
What holds attention determines distraction
Even checked distractions will lead you to distraction. What holds attention determinesÂ
This very day I have been repeating over and over to myself a verbal jingle whose mawkish silliness was the secret of
its haunting power. I loathed yet could not banish it.ÂWhat holds attention determines action.
William James, The Principles of Psychology
Was it a rhyme or a sick joke that got in the thinker’s way? What do you think James was referring to?
Fast forward to modern day distraction.Â
Abraham Lincoln on writing
âWriting, the art of communicating thoughts to the mind, through the eyeâ is the great invention of the world.â
â Abraham Lincoln
Down to Earth đ
Once it passed, they fell back to earth, and were crushed by the âtriviality of everydayness.â
— Gary Lachman, Beyond the Robot
Thinking aloud in chemical synchronicity
The brain’s pen will be mighter than the sword.
“Protect yourself from your own thoughts.” â Rumi
At which point it’s too late.
‘The only thing worse than being blind is having sight but no vision’
The only thing worse than being blind is having sight but no vision.
— Helen Keller, The Story of My Life
Pulitzer-prize winning novelist Jennifer Egan shares her three rules for writing
In her book Why We Write, 2011’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Jennifer Egan shares three writing tips for aspiring writers:
1. Read at the level at which you want to write. Reading is the nourishment that feeds the kind of writing you want to do. If what you really love to read is y, it might be hard for you to write x.
2. Exercising is a good analogy for writing. If youâre not used to exercising you want to avoid it forever. If youâre used to it, it feels uncomfortable and strange not to. No matter where you are in your writing career, the same is true for writing. Even fifteen minutes a day will keep you in the habit.
3. You can only write regularly if youâre willing to write badly. You canât write regularly and well. One should accept bad writing as a way of priming the pump, a warm-up exercise that allows you to write well.
Number two is my favorite piece of advice. Writing is like a muscle that needs to be worked out again and again, kind of like brushing your teeth. After you establish the habit, you should feel a bit empty when you don’t do it. Make a schedule and stick to it.
‘Fashion constantly begins and ends in the two things it abhors most, singularity and vulgarity’
To be old-fashioned is the greatest crime a coat or a hat can be guilty of. To look like nobody else is a sufficiently mortifying reflection ; to be in danger of being mistaken for one of the rabble is worse. Fashion constantly begins and ends in the two things it abhors most, singularity and vulgarity. It is the perpetual setting up and disowning a certain standard of taste, elegance, and refinement, which has no other foundation or authority than that it is the prevailing distinction of the moment, which was yesterday ridiculous from its being new, and to-morrow will be odious from its being common.
— William Hazlitt, Table-Talk
‘The secret of theft, which is also called creativity’
When asked how screenwriter and film director Paul Schrader came up with some of his scripts for the movie First Reformed, he responded like all remix artists:
PS: The secret of theft, which is also called âcreativity,â is you have to steal a bit from a lot of different places. You canât go to the same 7/11 every time because theyâll catch you. So you go to the photo shop, and you go to the gas station, and you go to that little hot dog stand that nobody goes to and by the end youâve stolen enough stuff from enough places that people think its yours.
The internet can be the largest copy-paste machine. But it also offers a chance to pluck from a diversity of sources. Just be sure to recast, remix, and redistribute them in your own voice. To put it another way, Steal Like An Artist.
Read First Reformed â Q&A with Ethan Hawke and Paul Schrader
‘People donât buy what you do; they buy why you do it’
âPeople donât buy what you do; they buy why you do it.â