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Century Quotes

“Television is a great job for a writer in the way that movies used to be, way before my time. Back when writers in Hollywood were on staff or under contract at any given studio and you'd write movie scripts and then the movies would get made within a few weeks, such that you could be a working writer in the movie business back in the '30s and '40s and '50s and have a hand in writing five or six movies a year that actually got produced. The only thing remotely like that in the 21st century here in Hollywood is working in the TV business.”

Way Writing Years Made Hands Jobs Used Given Five Week Century Television Tvs Six Hollywood Scripts Studios Used To Be My Time Contracts Staff 21st Century Back When Great Job Movie Business

Author:Vince Gilligan

“When I write lyrics, I really do go into an automatic folk appropriation mode... I see the vernacular register of 20th century song as being a bunch of forms to adapt and reconfigure.”

Writing Form Song Century Folks Bunch 20th Century Register Appropriation Vernacular

Author:Jonathan Lethem

“The Treatise of the Three Impostors is a book that enjoyed centuries of notorious nonexistence until (as Voltaire would say) it became necessary to invent it. Georges Minois writes with empathy, erudition, and a novelist's sense of buildup and timing, weaving in the parallel story of Europe's courageous freethinkers. In the face of today's social and even legal pressures against criticizing religion, it is good to see an honorable French tradition asserting itself.”

“Most of what I read is for reviewing purposes or related to something I want to write about. It's slightly utilitarian. I definitely miss that sense of being a disinterested reader who's reading purely for the pleasure of imagining his way into emotional situations and vividly realized scenes in nineteenth-century France or late nineteenth-century Russia.”

Way Want Writing Purpose Reading Pleasure Situation Century Missing Emotional Reader Scene Late Russia France Related Nineteenth Century Disinterested Utilitarian

Author:Pankaj Mishra

“Winter is on my head, but eternal spring is in my heart. The nearer I approach the end, the plainer I hear around me the immortal symphonies of the worlds which invite me. . . . For half a century I have been writing thoughts in prose, verse, history, drama, romance, tradition, satire, ode, and song. I have tried them all, but I feel I have not said a thousandth part of that which is within me. When I go down to the grave, I can say "I have finished my day's work," but I cannot say "I have finished my life's work."”

“The most powerful words in English are 'Tell me a story,' words that are intimately related to the complexity of history, the origins of language, the continuity of the species, the taproot of our humanity, our singularity, and art itself. I was born into the century in which novels lost their stories, poems their rhymes, paintings their form, and music its beauty, but that does not mean I had to like that trend or go along with it. I fight against these movements with every book I write.”

“When I submitted samples, I had only written stories to give myself something to draw. I was told, "The art is good, but not quite professional yet. But, I like the writing." I've been a writer for almost a half a century. It's very cool.”

Giving Writing Art Stories Half Written Century Draws Art Is Sample Very Cool Half A Century

Author:Len Wein

“The invention of photography has dealt a mortal blow to the old modes of expression, in painting as well as in poetry, where automatic writing, which appeared at the end of the nineteenth century, is a true photography of thought. Since a blind instrument now assured artists of achieving the aim they had set themselves up to that time, they now aspired, not without recklessness, to break with the imitation of appearances.”

Writing Wells Ends Artist Break Achieve Century Painting Expression Photography Aim Instruments Blind Blow Appearance Invention Mortals Imitation Assured Nineteenth Century Recklessness

Author:Andre Breton

“I think that life is incredibly violent and that individual people are incredibly violent on one level or another. I don't try to change life to suit my writing; in a certain way I'm a naturalist of the nineteenth century school.”

People Thinking Way Writing Trying School Life Is Certain Individual Levels Century Violent Suits Life Changing Nineteenth Century Naturalist

Author:Richard Grossman

“I think poets are supposed to be writing for television and film. I grew up in the day of early TV that was so raw and funny, and I think we're in the next important moment of television, where it's really telling the epic of the culture like Charles Dickens was doing in the 19th century with his serialized novels.”

Thinking Writing Important Moments Film Culture Next Novel Century Television Poet Tvs Grew Grew Up Supposed To Be Epic 19th Century Dickens Important Moments

Author:Eileen Myles

“I always wanted to write a book about LA, a big ambitious book. Nobody had ever really done it with LA- treating the city seriously as a major economic and cultural power, as the embodiment of 21st century America.”

Writing Book Done Bigs Wanted America Cities Economic Century Majors Ambitious 21st Century Embodiment

Author:James Frey

“One chronicler writes of an area of India during the end of the 20th century: Almost no-one in this slum was poor by Indian benchmarks. ... True, a few residents trapped rats and frogs and fried them for dinner. A few ate the scrub grass at the sewage lake edge. And these individuals, miserable souls, thereby made an inestimable contribution to their neighbors. They gave those slum dwellers who didn't fry rats and eat weeds a sense of their upward mobility.”

“We can't write a serious novel in the 21st century without acknowledging the inescapable self-awareness we're stuck with. The idea we're surrounded by falsehoods and lies. It's hard for the thinking person to believe in narratives. And yet we want some place to invest our belief.”

Thinking Want Writing Believe Persons Ideas Self Hard Lying Belief Novel Century Awareness Serious Self Awareness Stuck Narrative Falsehood 21st Century Thinking Person

Author:Michael Helm

“There are Harvard grads, free thinkers, feminists, abolitionists, well-to-do people who want to go write poetry and live on a farm and cook and laugh and have a good time. As they themselves described it, it was an "inward facing" community. They were focusing on making a better existence for themselves, which I think is also the driving force of 20th century communalism in the US, the thought being that the world is corrupt, and we're going to build this little garden of innocence.”

“I would be researching seventeenth-century garden design or I would be doing something with Pepys, but I just kept using all of it to write about Margaret Cavendish. It took me a long time to realize that I just wanted to write a book about her. Years.”

Writing Years Long Book Would Be Wanted Realizing Century Design Long Time Garden Garden Design

Author:Danielle Dutton

“Back then, when I had that original idea to write about the seventeenth century, the whole thing was set in 1666. I was thinking of Margaret near the end of her life, and that was the voice I heard for her.”

Thinking Writing Ideas Ends Whole Voice Heard Century Originals Original Ideas

Author:Danielle Dutton