It really got to me when someone asks what I did for a living and I realized I didn’t have a good answer. And it was just, I don’t know, it was like I’m in my apartment alone all day editing this thing that I’m calling a film but it wasn’t actually a film yet. So yeah, there’s a couple of times where I just gave up and decided I was going to go back and get a job and actually have a good answer to what I did for a living. That was going to be that.
Tag: quotes
It’s so hard with a word processor to know what a revision is.
In a tone that grew more defiantly nonchalant with every update, the pilot advised us that some of our bags would arrive on a future flight. Even with routine debacles such as this it’s rare to be promised future bullshit while the current bullshit is still very much in progress. Sorry ‘bout that, folks.
Michelle Orange, on the joys of airline travel.
State your needs, don’t test people on them.
I think we have to be frugal with our photo-viewing. I love it when you find a photo from a time you’ve forgotten about – one that, maybe, someone else had possession of. It makes you realise how linear and reductive memory is.
What’s done is done. Reality not maybe is zen.
Phil Jackson, philosopher emeritus of the NBA.
Take the hard feelings away, and this is the right thing to do. Put the feelings back and it hurts like hell, but the right thing to do hasn’t changed.
A complex mix of losing and winning may help you more with choking than simply lots of winning.
Tyler Cowen on sports psychology. Cf. antifragile?
If the world were merely seductive, that would be easy. If it were merely challenging, that would be no problem. But I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve (or save) the world and a desire to enjoy (or savor) the world. This makes it hard to plan the day.
E.B. White. (via)
Master the best that other people have ever figured out. Don’t just try to dream it all up yourself. Nobody’s that smart.
Charlie Munger. I’ve got more Munger wisdom on file.
Do yourself proud, in whatever shape that takes.
Fear and defensiveness, the architects of so many of our lowest moments.
Conspiracy is a nearly irresistible labor-saving device in the face of recalcitrant complexity.
Henry Louis Gates, quoted in The Signal and the Noise. Cf. William Gibson:
Conspiracy theories and the occult comfort us because they present models of the world that more easily make sense than the world itself, and, regardless of how dark or threatening, are inherently less frightening.
A man should never be ashamed to own he has been in the wrong, which is but saying in other words, that he is wiser today than he was yesterday.
It’s so intimate, and it’s one of your best friends, this stupid script that you end up living with for seventeen drafts or twenty drafts. […] You’re like, ‘You’re still here?? Can you clean up your shit? You leave it everywhere!’
Literature is Eucharistic. You take somebody else’s suffering into your body and you’re changed by it, you’re made larger by their pain.
Everybody talks about the writer’s feeling and the writer’s expression and the writer’s experience, and, you know, I don’t give a fuck how the writer feels. I want a fucking book that I can be in love with. I want a book that I’ll reread seventeen times. That’s what I want.
Relationships are complicated, but happiness in a relationship isn’t: It’s just wanting exactly what you have. Wanting something else is dispiriting.
I think every kid wants to rebel against their parents and my parents are cool, artistic, creative people. So my way to rebel was to take the academic route. I always wanted to go to college and go to law school.
This is what RSS is for, these days: you set a snare, leave it, and trap for yourself the words you want to read most.
Mark Larson 