I had an agent who spent eight years - eight years! - trying to sell my stories. She sold other people's work; she just didn't sell mine.
We're beautiful devices. The devices work well; we're all experts in what we do. But when the mechanism fails, those failures can tell you a lot about how the mind works.
When you're making something big, whether it's long-form fiction or a big piece of software, whatever that is, you're having a very intimate and extended conversation with the work materials themselves.
There's no path to being a writer that's applicable to everyone. Some young writers have the fortitude to work in a vacuum. For me, it was important to have some sense that my failures weren't unique.
In workshopping short stories I learned how to get character down, and how to work with ratios of literal to fantastic to make a world that people can believe in even if it's a little wild or out there.
I work on the boundary between economics and statistics in this field called econometrics. Part of my interest is understanding how you use statistics in productive ways to analyze dynamic economic models.
Most fledgling and mid-list writers are lucky to be offered a 4-figure sum and are not only expected to deliver copy that needs minimal editing but also take an active part in marketing and publicizing their work.
Writers have it easy. If you write a bestseller or have your book made into a movie, you'll never have to work again, or so the myth goes.
I think in some ways what Snowden is, is he's a mix of a cold war spy novel and post-9/11 spy novel.
What is the use of physicians like myself trying to help parents to bring up children healthy and happy, to have them killed in such numbers for a cause that is ignoble?
Abroad, our most important policy is to support our troops and continue forward-thinking foreign policy in the war on terror - keeping our enemies on the run and hitting them before they hit us.
The First World War, and especially the latest one, largely swept away what was left in Europe of feudalism and of feudal landlords, especially in Poland, Hungary, and the South East generally.
The aftermath of the war is what inspired us to write many of our plays. The whole reason for our writing Inherit the Wind was that we were appalled at the blacklisting. We were appalled at thought control.
When I was first sent from H.M.S. King Alfred to be interviewed by Goodeve in the Admiralty, I was furious. The War seemed to me, in June of 1940, to be desperately serious, and England in imminent peril of invasion.
The true miracle is that abstract considerations of logic lead to a unique theory that predicts and describes a vast universe full of the amazing variety that we see.
But Aunt Margaret doesn't like boys," objected Elnora. "Well, she likes me, and I used to be a boy. ...
I'm not trouble at all. I'm just a guy trying to get a girl to give him the time of day. I'm like every song on the radio.
Time and space are finite in extent, but they don't have any boundary or edge. They would be like the surface of the earth, but with two more dimensions.
The people who actually make the advances in theoretical physics don't think in these categories that the philosophers and the historians of science subsequently invent for them
If you are a writer or any kind of artist, if you change something as fundamental as where you live - the way you live - then I think you change the very instrument that is trying to make the art.
Everybody thinks they know what art should be. But very few of them have the sense that is necessary to experience painting, that is the sense of sight, that sees colors and forms as living reality in the picture.
