I failed to get into drama school, and my best friend told me I should do stand-up instead. I was always doing gags and voices, so he booked a gig for me without telling me. I only had four days to write it. I did a seven-minute set; the first four m...
If the Frieze Art Fair catches on, I imagine at least two great things happening. First, we will once again have a huge art fair in town that isn't too annoying to go to. More importantly, Frieze may finally show New Yorkers that we can cross our own...
The great thing about doing art shows is you get to meet the people who are interested in your art, and I think that when you're purchasing a piece of art it's a tremendous bonus to get to meet the artist because you get a chance to pick their brain ...
I think my first experience of art, or the joy in making art, was playing the horn at some high-school dance or bar mitzvah or wedding, looking at a roomful of people moving their bodies around in time to what I was doing. There was a piano player, a...
She had had her momentary flowering, a year, perhaps, of wildrose beauty, and then she had suddenly swollen like a fertilized fruit and grown hard and red and coarse, and then her life had been laundering, scrubbing, laundering, first for children, t...
With the smell so close, the ocean came into view only a few moments later, sometimes peeking between old brick buildings with bright blue eyes, other times peering for a lingering moment like long lost relatives seeing one another for the first time...
This was a factory, a sorting house. We were no different from dogs and pigs and cows: all of us were allowed to play when we were small, but then, just before reaching maturity, we were sorted and classified. Being a high school student was the firs...
It would have been hard for Fat Charlie to say exactly when the accumulation of birds on the wire mesh moved from interesting to terrifying. It was somewhere in the first hundred or so, anyway. And it was in the way they didn't coo, or caw, or trill,...
I never fancied cats much till I found the First Mate," he remarked, to the accompaniment of the Mate's tremendous purrs. "I saved his life, and when you've saved a creature's life you're bound to love it. It's next thing to giving life.
For the first time I realize how perilous peace can be. I appreciate the tightrope that my grandfather has spent his whole life trying to walk. And now, more than ever, I grow terrified that I'm going to make us all fall down.
Because this is another thing your average American man in crisis does: he tries to go home, forgetting, momentarily, that he is the reason he left home in the first place, that the home is not his anymore, and that the crisis is him.
We came to realise - first with astonishment, then bitterness, and finally with indifference - that intellect apparently wasn't the most important thing...not ideas, but the system; not freedom, but drill. We had joined up with enthusiasm and with go...
Perfume was first created to mask the stench of foul and offensive odors... Spices and bold flavorings were created to mask the taste of putrid and rotting meat... What then was music created for? Was it to drown out the voices of others, or the voic...
They do not like evidence like that, anything too definite because our first instinct is to find flaws and debunk. They want to be discussed and portrayed, but never proven. They want to be credited as the true makers of the pyramids and lifters of S...
All you need, you think, is a breather, a few minutes standing up at the bar like in the old days, having a harmless bottle of beer. Only the bottle of beer isn't harmless; it's a trigger. It sets off that crazy thing in your mind that made you a dip...
A warm sunny evening, the plash and gurgle of the waves in the rock pools, the rush of the cold gin. I thought for the first time of my novel, abandoned, all these years, and I came up, unprompted, with the perfect title. Octet. Octet by Logan Mounts...
Whenever I'm asked what advice I have for young writers, I always say that the first thing is to read, and to read a lot. The second thing is to write. And the third thing, which I think is absolutely vital, is to tell stories and listen closely to t...
But he was able to understand one thing: making a decision was only the beginning of things. When someone makes a decision, he is really diving into a strong current that wil carry him into places he had never dreamed of when he first made the decisi...
There are, first of all, two kinds of authors: those who write for the subject's sake, and those who write for writing's sake. [...] The truth is that when an author begins to write for the sake of covering paper, he is cheating the reader; because h...
The first sign of greatness is when a man does not attempt to look and act great. Before you can call yourself a man at all, Kipling assures us, you must "not look too good nor talk too wise.
His eyes went again to the crucifix above his head, reflected in the mirror. The strained arms, the arched spine. All that effort to open the gates of heaven for us and we (he thought) probably spend out first hours among the heavenly hosts settling ...
