The conventions of an almighty agency tapping you for greatness and signing you up and telling you this is going to be the next big thing; that has not been my career.
Providing a writer isn't put off by conventions - and some are - attending them can be a nice break from the necessary isolation of writing.
I speak for a lot of church groups, youth groups, schools, colleges and do personal appearances. I've done conventions and trade shows. A lot of different little hats.
Listen to advice. You don't know how many writer's conferences I've taught at where at least half the audience fights all the conventions of the field.
Military police know what to do, they know the Geneva Conventions, and their objective is to provide a safe, secure, fair environment for prisoners under their control.
One of the reasons, surely, why women have been credited with less perfect veracity than men is that the burden of conventional falsehood falls chiefly on them.
A lot was happening, plus there were an enormous number of people in the industry that were going to conventions, so it was a pretty fun time. Also there was a lot of controversy and I was at the forefront of some of that.
I'm not a money manager, but I can tell you what the conventional wisdom is. The younger you are, the more risk you can take on.
If organized religion has become less relevant, it's not because churches have held fast to their creedal beliefs - it's because they've held fast to their conventional structures, programs, roles and routines.
I wear the Jewish star, but I'm not - I haven't converted to Judaism, and I'm not - I'm not - I'm not Jewish in the conventional sense because the Kaballah is a belief system that predates religion and predates Judaism as an organized religion.
At one of the annual conventions of the American Society for Aesthetics much confusion arose when the Society for Anesthetics met at the same time in the same hotel.
But if you want to know the truth, the weirdest thing that has happened has been my discovery that people who attend the conventions are filled with love.
Beethoven's importance in music has been principally defined by the revolutionary nature of his compositions. He freed music from hitherto prevailing conventions of harmony and structure.
New forms of media - first movies, then television, talk radio and now the Internet - tend to challenge traditional codes of conduct. They flout convention, shake up the status quo and sometimes provoke outrage.
A director's dream? No, Bollywood reality in 1995.Business is booming, but cliché's are passée. A different sort of breeze-fresh, young-is unsettling fatigued conventions.
States are like people. They do not question the awful status quo until some dramatic event overturns the conventional and lax way of thinking.
I guess they often cast me as the bad guy, because I'm not, er, conventional looking. I look sort of violent. I'm the odd one out, the outsider.
Raising a child is a little like Picasso's work; in the beginning he did very conventional representational things. Cubism came after he had the rules down pat.
With '44 Scotland Street' I found myself having to work out how a daily novel works, and it is completely different to a conventional novel.
I had to teach myself to let go of the conventional rock way of playing guitar and singing. Some things you wouldn't expect to work, did and some things won't ever work.
Conventional turbines only work up to 200 feet, but capturing a small fraction of the global wind energy at higher altitudes could be sufficient to supply the current energy needs of the globe.
