A drop-out designer in Portland, OR via Campbell, CA
If you didn’t get hugged enough as a kid, you won’t find what you’re looking for from me. That’s not my gig and I’m not attuned to it. On Zodiac I had a conversation with Jake, and I said, “I guarantee I’m going to make a good movie out of this. You can decide if you want to be the weakest thing in it, or you can decide if you want to show up.”
— David Fincher talking about how he directs actors in an interview with Playboy
Previously: “My idea of professionalism…”
It isn’t that they can’t see the solution. It is that they can’t see the problem.
— G. K. Chesterton
- Mallory: Don’t play dumb with me.
- Sam: No, honestly, I am dumb. Most of the time, I’m playing smart.
— From an episode of The West Wing
It’s not difficult, as a young writer, to feel anxious, moody, and paranoid. Lawyers, dentists, and car salesmen do not directly compete with all of the people who have ever practiced law, dentistry, and car salesmanship. But anyone who decides to write joins a bruising free-for-all in which a dwindling number of attention spans are being fought over by the many dead writers whose books are still brilliant, and the multitude of the living who aspire to achieve that status.
— Ben Tarnoff (Mark Twain, Writing Coach and Role Model)
[...] balanced people don’t usually change the world. If you want to be balanced, go and work at the bank and live for happy hour.
— Chris Guillebeau in an an interview with 99U
I’m most superstitious about hubris. I am terrified about having things taken away from me because I finally relax. When I wrote the pilot of Mad Men, I was saying, I’m already successful, why am I not happy? Now it’s become, You didn’t even know what success was. What if your dreams came true?
—Matthew Weiner, creator of Mad Men in an interview with The Paris Review
If your biz plan depends on you suddenly being “discovered” by some big shot, your plan will probably fail. Nobody suddenly discovers anything. Things are made slowly and in pain.
— Hugh MacLeod in an article that inspired his book, Ignore Everybody
- Andy: They’re trying. But they know they’re not going to get anything on the air. Lesson One is they got to live and die on Friday night. They got to feel like success in a 3 minute sketch is the same thing as love. And they got to fear failure like it’s grim death. They got to be every bit as damaged as you are.
- Danny: What do you think he should do?
- Andy: Toss them in the river [...] Give their sketch a spot at the dress [rehearsal] tonight. Let them hear what 300 people not laughing sounds like.
— From an episode of Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip
Previously: Like
Some people go to the movies to be reminded that everything’s okay. I don’t make those kinds of movies. That, to me, is a lie. Everything’s not okay.
— David Fincher in a 2007 interview with Esquire
But the skill I picked up in school that turned out to be the most valuable was learning how to take a punch. We had these insane critiques where we’d trash each other viciously. […] It was an art form in itself. We were basically trying to see if we could get each other to drop out of school.
— Mike Monteiro talks about design & business in an interview
Who in hell ever respected Shelley, Whitman, Poe, O. Henry, Verlaine, Swinburne, Villon, Shakespeare ect when they were alive. Shelley + Swinburne were fired from college; Verlaine + O Henry were in jail. The rest were drunkards or wasters and told generally by the merchants and petty politicians and jitney messiahs of their day that real people wouldn’t stand it. And the merchants and messiahs, the shrewd + the dull, are dust — and the others live on.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald responds to hate mail
Previously: “It’s only ugly because it’s new and you don’t like it”
We are like butterflies who flutter for a day and think it’s forever.
—Carl Sagan in Cosmos
If you don’t understand the business of your art then it is just a hobby.
—Julia Eastwood
- Charlie: Fix that.
- MacKenzie: How?
- Charlie: You put a help wanted ad in the paper for someone who can do your job.
- MacKenzie: Good. Anything else?
- Charlie: I just want to know that it didn’t happen.
- MacKenzie: That’s not easy to do.
- Charlie: You should include in the ad that applicants need to be able to do hard things.
— From an episode of Newsroom
But as anything that is exciting to people, it will often be co-opted by others who aren’t as disciplined about it and all of a sudden it becomes cliché.
— David Fincher in an interview with Art of the Title