After I left Texas and went to California, I had a hard time getting anyone to play anything that I was writing, so I had to end up playing them myself. And that's how I ended up just being a saxophone player.
I am real, real picky with what I decided to do. I want to make sure it's new and at the same time that it's in the same color of what I have played before. Not to pigeon hole myself but I don't like to do fluff.
At times, I think of my career as a map. The closer you get to the map, the more you know where you are, but the closer I get to my career, the less happy I feel. At the same time, I have carved out the career for myself which I wanted.
Courses on historical methodology are not worth the time that they take up. I shall never give one myself, and I have observed that many of my colleagues who do give such courses refrain from exemplifying their methods by writing anything.
I'd never imagined myself in a band. So the fact that I've had such a long career without really naturally pursuing it is really astounding. It's taken me a long time to accept what I do for a living and actually feel like I have anything of value to...
Here's a habit I never thought I'd develop: I gravitate to anything online that's marked 'most popular' or 'most e-mailed.' And I hate myself a little bit every time I do.
Actually, I've never thought myself as being a particularly hard worker. I've always worked, and I guess my mind is busy all the time. I've been in a lot of things just because of my own intellectual curiosity.
Yet in all those cases I finally steeled myself to seize the opportunity, and find a way to muddle through and eventually conclude that I had, in fact, chosen the right path, as risky as it seemed at the time.
I don't project no image. I just act like myself. I write about how I feel, the emotional stage I'm in at the time. So I write from the heart. I never write from my mind. My brain, I mean.
I'm always trying to do stuff I haven't done before or challenge myself so I'm not resting on my laurels all of the time because if I just found my little niche and never left it, I'd be pretty boring, I think.
I became much happier when I realized I shouldn't depend solely on my career for my sense of self. So I developed other interests and surrounded myself with a small group of friends I could trust.
One of the things I had to learn as a writer was to trust the act of writing. To put myself in the position of writing to find out what I was writing. I did that with 'World's Fair,' as with all of them. The inventions of the book come as discoveries...
Yelburton: My goodness, what happened to your nose? Jake Gittes: I cut myself shaving. Yelburton: You ought to be more careful. That must really smart. Jake Gittes: Only when I breathe.
Jean-Dominique Bauby: I decided to stop pitying myself. Other than my eye, two things aren't paralyzed, my imagination and my memory.
Donnie Brasco: If I come out alive, this guy, Lefty, ends up dead. That's the same thing as me putting the bullet in his head myself.
Axel: Lemme ask you a question: how come I never see you eat? Nick: I like to starve myself: it keeps the fear up.
Madox: I have to teach myself not to read too much into everything. It comes from too long having to read so much into hardly anything at all.
Tyler Durden: Hey, you created me. I didn't create some loser alter-ego to make myself feel better. Take some responsibility!
Galloway: Are you planning on doing any investigating, or are you just gonna take the guided tour? Kaffee: I'm pacing myself.
Commander John J. Adams: Nice climate you have here. High oxygen content. Robby the Robot: I seldom use it myself, sir. It promotes rust.
Michael Corleone: I swear on the lives of my children, give me one last chance to redeem myself and I will sin no more.
