One of the humbling things about having written more than one novel is the sense that every time you begin, that new empty page does not know who you are.
Then I started graduate school at UCLA. I got a part time research assistant job as a programmer on a project involving the use of one computer to measure the performance of another computer.
I try and get it right the first time. I may rewrite a sentence four or five times, but I rarely go back and kill a whole page and rewrite it.
Enterprise Systems, I mean. And not just a little bit, either. Orders of magnitude wrong. Billions and billions of dollars worth of wrong. Hang-our-heads-in-shame wrong. It's time to stop the madness.
I'm pretty sure this is it for the teen movie thing. It's so frustrating to read when you get to page 20 and you're like, Oy! It's the same thing again!
I first met the subject of X-ray diffraction of crystals in the pages of the book W. H. Bragg wrote for school children in 1925, 'Concerning the Nature of Things.'
It seemed uncanny that words, spread across a page just so, had the power to transport me to another time or place. But they could.
Poetry for me is very easy. It's like a lightning bolt. I feel this calling, and the first line of the poem comes into my head, and I just have to go to the page, to the typewriter, to the computer or whatever and write it.
A first-generation fortune is the most likely to be given away, but once a fortune is inherited it's less likely that a very high percentage will go back to society.
Giving teenagers some inspiration, a single role model and an opportunity to be part of something bigger at a critical point in their lives can be the difference between being a productive or being a destructive member of society.
I could not bear to think that I wrote a five-hundred page novel just because I needed to love my father.
I explored rock culture and what the guitar can do though people like Jimmy Page and John McLaughlin, and the music moves away from pop.
Everybody was on the same page. Nobody has really gone out there on a different musical journey. When we got back together again, we all wanted to do the same kind of music.
I wake up every morning at nine and grab for the morning paper. Then I look at the obituary page. If my name is not on it, I get up.
I mean, if you have to wake up in the morning to be validated by the editorial page of the New York Times, you got a pretty sorry existence.
I remember my mom saying to me that what your friends do is one thing, but what you do could be on the front page of the paper.
I come from the place where I am thinking 'I have put my blood on the pages.'
On plenty of days the writer can write three or four pages, and on plenty of other days he concludes he must throw them away.
Finding the one who loves you is like lottery but you don't have to close up the page, just keep on searching and you'll find.
Having an intelligent secretary does not get rid of the need to read, write, and draw, etc. In a well functioning world, tools and agents are complementary.
I don't know how many of you have ever met Dijkstra, but you probably know that arrogance in computer science is measured in nano-Dijkstras.
