Trying Quotes - Page 511

Don't write about trying to change the world, just write about a changed world or a world that's not changing. Let that do the work.

Name ten thousand reasons why you never want to die, go and tell someone who might've forgotten. Try to list the endless reasons why it's good to be alive, and then just smile for a while about them.

I've... learned that it's a hell of a lot easier to just build something than to try to convince somebody who doesn't believe it's possible.

Movies are not novels, and that's why, when filmmakers try to adapt novels, particularly long or complex novels, the result is almost always failure. It can't be done.

Then, without any warning, we both straightened up, turned towards each other, and began to kiss. After that, it is difficult for me to speak of what happened. Such things have little to do with words, so little, in fact, that it seems almost pointless to try to express them. If anything, I would say that we were falling into each other, that we were falling so fast and so far that nothing could catch us.

It's June second, he told himself. Try to remember that. This is New York, and tomorrow will be June third. If all goes well, the following day will be the fourth. But nothing is certain.

I wanted to do something different. Therefore, the first person I thought would have been too exclusionary. It would have said me, me, me, me, me. I, I, I, I, I. As if I were pushing away my experiences from the experiences of others. Because basically what I was trying to do was show our commonality. I mean to say, in the very ordinariness of what I recount I think perhaps the reader will find resonances with his or her own life.

I think most writers can't really think about their work without a kind of revulsion. And I think that's probably why we keep going back and trying again, trying to do better each time.

What I'm trying to do [in Winter Journal] is to tell the story of a man's life from birth, but there are different versions of him, four different versions.

The kind of fiction I'm trying to write is about telling the truth.

I try to look at what KG does, what Tim Duncan does, what Amare Stoudamire does ... I compare and evaluate myself with them.

I try to think about Shakespeare, leap year, the Beatles.

I try to think about Elvis, Memphis, Oprah in the afternoon.

If you actually do cold readings, it's very close to how people actually talk, because you're experiencing these thoughts anew every moment, and trying to make them come out coherently.

I'm always trying out new stuff onstage. That's where I do all my writing.

Beyond any role that I ever had, really early on as a stand-up, I would see actors decide to try it and they would bomb miserably. What I realized was that stand-up, acting and writing are all their own disciplines.

From the beginning I felt that I didn't ever want to leave the impression that the process of writing a poem is totally mysterious. I couldn't explain everything that went on in the creation of a poem, but I could try to explain as much as I knew. I thought readers deserved that. I didn't want to set myself apart as being someone special.

I'd try to write my poems in a certain rhythm. I had my rock 'n' roll stuff for performing and my denser stuff for writing.

I really feel concerned about young people within our present culture. Our present culture, we have to change. Change is inevitable and I wasn't raised in our present culture but it has great pressure that as a young person I never had. Material pressure, social pressure, visual pressure, how you look, and I just try to appeal to young people to think for themselves, to be their own person, and to ask questions and also be very attentive to our planet and our environment.

I was always trying to pick guys up. I'd ask guys out and stuff like that. I had no pride. I was the biggest lurch at dances, waiting for the ladies' choice. I'd lunge at my prey like a baby wolf.

If someone didn't want to be filmed, or my children said, "Don't film me anymore," [Steven Sebring] didn't try to sneak a shot or cajole them; he just respected their wishes.

What I say should always be prefaced with this: I'm not really politically articulate. I just try to be like Thomas Paine: what is common sense? So when I say these things to you, I am speaking from a humanist point of view. I just look around and see what's wrong.

I personally am not interested in people trying to pigeonhole me.

Electronic music was just discovery about sound, all our sound options. The core percussions and melodies, they forget about it, they didn't think about those those for a good four, five years, because they were just discovering the new tools and what they could do with them, you know? The big folk revival, I think is a backlash against that. And now, I think they'll probably try to find somewhere in the middle. It's interesting. It's like push-and-pull. It's always like that, you know? Music history is always like that, this repeating evolution of music.

My only job as an actor is to try and understand the character and, to the best of my ability, bring this character to life.