There was a Russian director named Elem Klimov, who did his films during the communist days. They were constantly struggling with the authorities and to be allowed to express themselves. But he did one of the best war movies I've ever seen - it's cal...
Author reports that a group of tortoises was given to the British by India's natives during the Seven Years War which ended in 1763. The last of those tortoises died in 2004 at the age of 255.
In serious Victorian fiction, as in Shakespearian tragedy, melodrama normally functions as metaphor. The author finds a vivid equivalent for a reality too elaborate or too extended to be briefly depicted.
Reading is dreaming. Reading is entering a world of imagination shared between reader and author. Reading is getting beyond the words to the story or meaning underneath.
By reading a lot of novels in a variety of genres, and asking questions, it's possible to learn how things are done - the mechanics of writing, so to speak - and which genres and authors excel in various areas.
In the timeless and universal manner of authors conversing in public places, he did not fail to mention its title, “Volume III of Principia Mathematica entitled, The System of the World, available shortly, where books are sold.
The author who benefits you most is not the one who tells you something you did not know before, but the one who gives expression to the truth that has been dumbly struggling in you for utterance.
We don't read novels to have an experience like life. Heck, we're living lives, complete with all the incompleteness. We turn to fiction to have an author assure us that it means something.
(From Boulez, an authorized biography by Joan Peyser) At the chapel door he [a priest associated with a school Boulez attended] asked me if what he had been told was true: that Boulez no longer believed in God. I said it was...
A bold reform agenda is our moral obligation. If we make the case effectively and win this November, then we will have the moral authority to enact the kind of fundamental reforms America has not seen since Ronald Reagan's first year.
Many small towns I know in Maine are as tight-knit and interdependent as those I associate with rural communities in India or China; with deep roots and old loyalties, skeptical of authority, they are proud and inflexibly territorial.
Authors always carry a means for scribbling and an excuse for pausing, often inopportunely, to record those fleeting sparks of creative fancy that might otherwise vanish like a wisp in the wind if ignored. Writing is a jealous and needy lover.
And I have been campaigning for the past three months trying to get the Senate Judiciary Committee that has the oversight authority and responsibility to start its own public hearings.
Many critics of the Palestinians, especially those in Congress, think the current calm is merely the eye of the storm. That's why the House of Representatives approved a foreign aid package last week that forbade the direct financial assistance to th...
Following our inner guidance may feel risky and frightening at first, because we are no longer playing it safe, doing what we 'should' do, pleasing others, following rules, or deferring to outside authority.
I'm a very shy person, and I never tried to do theater. I've been asked many, many times by the most incredible authors in America to do theater. And I always said no, not knowing what it is to be on the stage and to do theater.
The ones that landed near the bathroom are Bad Tolkien imitations or transcripts of a D&D adventure; bad Herbert, Heinlein, and Asimov are below the television; and these on the bed are the ones whose authors I want to hunt down personally and slap.
I think that if you get too close to the character, if you do too much historical research, you may find yourself defending your view of a character against the author's view, and I think that's terribly dangerous.
Before, it was always, 'Oh, no, here comes Clancy, that insurance agent.' Now it's, 'Oh, here comes Tom Clancy, bestselling author.' But I'm still the same basic middle-class slob.
Amazon is now the definitive source for data about whole sets of products - fungible consumer products. EBay is the authoritative source for the secondary market of those products. Google is the authority for information about facts, but they're rela...
I think of myself as unconventional, I guess. I maybe always had a problem with authority, like a stubbornness about what's expected - despite wanting to get some recognition through performing - but also not always wanting to do the expected thing.
