A drop-out designer in Portland, OR via Campbell, CA
Ira Glass talks about Terry Gross’ interview style:
There’ve been times when I’ve relistened, just to hear the order of the questions and to figure out what was planned and unplanned. Like a magician sitting in on another guy’s act for two nights so he can figure out the trick, to steal it.
— Ira Glass (Terry Gross and the Art of Opening Up)
Just as food engineers have figured out how to make food hyper-palatable by manipulating fat, salt and sugar, similarly the media has become expert at making irresistible mental stimuli.
— Matthew Crawford (Distraction is a kind of obesity of the mind)
There’s a lot that happens with collaboration in movies and TV that is phenomenal. But at the same time, there’s some perfecting that goes with it. You all get together and work on stuff and make it perfect, but sometimes perfect looks the same as other perfect. [...] When you write from your gut and let the stuff stay flawed and don’t let anybody tell you to make it better, it can end up looking like nothing else.
— Louis C.K. in an interview with Pitchfork
You know the cliché: You’re out on the town, you’re doing drugs, you’re drinking, you’re running on the walls, you’re pissing on the fireplace. It’s a cliché. Often you run into artists who live that life—and at one point, you find out that they’re not actually producing that much art. They’re living the life of the artist without the work.
— Dorthe Nors in What Great Artists Need: Solitude
- Isaac: Someone holds the copyright to ‘Happy Birthday’?
- Dan: They’re representatives of Patty and Mildred Hill.
- Isaac: Took two people to write that song?
— From an episode of Sports Night
I have the same reaction whenever a musician is exposed for using ghostwriters.
It took seven years from the time I wrote Mad Men until it finally got on the screen. I lived every day with that script as if it were going to happen tomorrow. That’s the faith you have to have.
— Matthew Weiner in an excerpt from Getting There: A Book of Mentors by Gillian Zoe Segal
Previously:
“When I wrote the pilot of Mad Men, I was saying, I’m already successful, why am I not happy?”
We must believe in luck. For how else can we explain the success of those we don’t like?
— Jean Cocteau
The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.
— George Bernard Shaw
We have a paradox about progress: many people complain about how stuck in the past their organizations are, yet point to the lack of adoption of remote work as an indicator of it’s uselessnesses, rather than a reflection of their organization’s fearful grip on the status quo.
— Scott Berkun in his article Why Isn’t Remote Work More Popular?
Part of my testiness is that I feel I make 50 compromises a day. When people come to me and say, ‘Why can’t you compromise?’ I’m like: ‘What are you talking about? The fact that we’re having this conversation means that we’ve compromised.’
— David Fincher on dealing with movie executives in an interview with NY Times
Previously: “I guarantee I’m going to make a good movie out of this…”
- Paul: Between friends…
- C.J.: Yeah.
- Paul: Is the water over your head?
- C.J.: No. The water’s exactly at my head.
— From an episode of The West Wing
Errands are so effective at killing great projects that a lot of people use them for that purpose. Someone who has decided to write a novel, for example, will suddenly find that the house needs cleaning. People who fail to write novels don’t do it by sitting in front of a blank page for days without writing anything. They do it by feeding the cat, going out to buy something they need for their apartment, meeting a friend for coffee, checking email. “I don’t have time to work,” they say. And they don’t; they’ve made sure of that.
— Paul Graham in his essay, Procrastination
What’s urgent are emails, texts, tweets, calls, and news.
What’s important is spending a thousand hours to learn a new skill that will really help you in your life or work. What’s important is giving your full undistracted attention to the important people in your life. What’s important is taking time to get exercise, or to collect and share what you’ve learned.
But none of these things will ever be urgent.
So you have to ignore the tempting cries of the urgent, and deliberately choose what you know is important.
— Derek Sivers on the meaning of life
Making films is all about — as soon as you’re finished — continually regretting what you’ve done. When we look at films we’ve made, all we can see are the flaws; we can’t even watch them in a normal way. I never feel like watching my own films again. So unless I start working on a new one, I’ll never be free from the curse of the last one.
— Hayao Miyazaki in his book Turning Point: 1997–2008
I write one page of masterpiece to ninety one pages of shit. I try to put the shit in the wastebasket.
— Ernest Hemingway in a letter to F. Scott Fitzgerald
Previously: “Sometimes magic is just someone spending more time…”