Your spouse, a sibling, a friend need to read your drafts. They have to be people unafraid to tell you what sucks. For early feedback, that's more important than professional editorial skill. Most people know what sucks.
If you can tell me what gun, type of gun, I can possess, then I didn't really get that right to keep and bear arms from God. It was not bequeathed to me; it was not unalienable, right?
The novel is a thing of irony and ambiguity. That's at the heart of 'J', a world that has stopped arguing with itself. We have to keep our equilibrium of hate, which is argument. But on the Internet, you find a unanimity of response, and in 'J,' there's a fear of that, that discourse becomes a statement of political or ideological belief.
But doing what I do, you will never get unanimity of people.
You see, party labels do not ensure unanimity any more than trying to cast the challenge we confront as a people through a partisan prism.
My way of viewing the talking filibuster was as a way of doing unanimous consent with your feet. You object by going down and talking.
To me, the remarkable thing is it's pretty much unanimous the way blind people have been perceived in all cultures and for millennia. The first is, if they can't see, they must be stupid. The second one is, and this is a very old one, that blindness is such a terrible thing that it must be a curse from God for some evil that you committed.
We are protecting civilians. We are unarmed. We are no threat to you. Please do not shoot.
It takes minutes to play, but 'Unmanned' sticks with you for long after the credits roll. As a part of a two-man team for an unarmed drone, you experience one day in the life of this man who's tired of staring through the camera of a drone flying around the Middle East and keeping his finger on the trigger.
People say I'm deceptively unassuming, but that's the way I go through life. I'm not flash. You can make it sound calculated, but it's pretty much just me.
Perfection is an unattainable goal. It isn't going to be perfect. Just get words down on paper, and when you stumble to what you think is the end of the book, you will have hundreds of pages of words that came out of your head. It may not be perfect, but it looks like a book.
When you fall in love with favourite movie stars, it's not because they're movie stars and unattainable, but because they show you sides of themselves that are extremely personal.
It just seemed like an unattainable dream to go down to Los Angeles and to land a professional working, acting gig on a show that you really love with a character you really connect with. That doesn't seem possible; that seems insane.
Do you know how rare it is in parts of America to actually see 'an outfit'? France? I don't want to be anti-French, but there isn't a more unattractive group of people on the streets.
I can walk into a bookshop and point out a number of books that I find very unattractive in what they say. But it doesn't occur to me to burn the bookshop down. If you don't like a book, read another book. If you start reading a book and you decide you don't like it, nobody is telling you to finish it.
Change is unavoidable. You change either to stay ahead or to catch up.
Your family is unavoidable. You cannot escape them or trade them in for another family. You also can't change them... but you can change your response to them.
I think today the players are too nice to one another, but that might change with the unbalanced schedule, with teams playing each other more and more. When you face each other that much, with that much at stake, something's bound to happen.
As an athlete, you learn to keep pushing through the pain until the pain eventually becomes unbearable. Even then, you are told to continue.
Sometimes the odds are against you-the director doesn't know what the hell he's doing, or something falls apart in the production, or you're working with an actor who's just unbearable.
