Inspirational quotes 18

Happy new year!  

Here's my collection of Inspirational quotes 18: 

Mar. 4 International Festival of Authors: I was reading this National Post article I cut out called “Michael Chabon and Junot Diaz living on the page” on Oct. 27, 2012.   It’s about the authors Michael Chabon and Junot who are at this festival.  I went to website and it’s held in Toronto in October.

http://ifoa.org/festival

Living in your head: Here is the excerpt of the article.  It’s the ending of it.  You can read the full article where I provide the link at the bottom:  

There’s a scene in “Otravida, Otravez,” one of the stories in Díaz’s new collection, when the narrator, looking at her friend, who gave up both her husband and children when she came to the United States, says she “understands what has to be sacrificed on a voyage.” I ask if either of them have sacrificed anything to make it.

“There’s few people who would argue that one does not have to cut a deal with reality to spend so much time on these projects,” Díaz says. “Whether you’re a young artist, or you’re an artist late in their career, you have made a f–king deal with reality. You’re not going to be in the world as much as a normal person, I don’t think. Ninety-nine per cent of my life has been lived in pages. It’s OK. One wins, one feels like they’ve published books, we get reviewed, we go on tour. That’s wonderful. But let’s be real: You give up a lot of s–t to keep your nose in a book for 16 years. I’m not crying. I’m not a victim. But when I think about the larger things, I think about the years of lived life that have gone into [the books].”

“And you lose the ability, after a while, to actually live life, to engage,” Chabon says. “It becomes to such a habit to remain at a certain distance that it can be hard to bridge that distance, to come back out again. You’re always observing and note-taking.”

“You can never account for the things that you have lost when you weren’t paying attention,” Díaz says. “All my relationships that have gone away from me — how many of them were because I wasn’t paying attention to them instead of paying attention to the books? And there’s no accounting for some stuff. I don’t even have a full bill yet.”

“It will be presented in time, no doubt,” Chabon says.

Díaz agrees. “It certainly will.”

http://arts.nationalpost.com/2012/10/26/michael-chabon-and-junot-diaz/

"I don't invent characters. I invite strangers. Out of my subconscious.  Then cut them slack, to see what they'll do."-@greatdismal (William Gibson)

“Every book is a total experience in itself.  It’s a world in itself and when you finish the book you’re moving on to another world.”-Farley Mowat

 

Author Mark Lavorato’s most despised classic: ‘I hated Catch-22’ interview in

The Globe and Mail, Mar. 28 2014: 

Whose sentences are your favourite, and why?

I love Annie Proulx’s alteration between dense and sparse prose. “Everybody that went away suffered a broken heart. ‘I’m coming back some day,’ they all wrote. But never did. The old life was too small to fit anymore.” Perfect.

What’s the best advice you’ve ever received?

“Remember that what you hate in others is simply what you hate in yourself.” I was told this once, almost flippantly, in a conversation, and was bowled over with how accurate it was. It ends up really helping out with writing. You can indirectly define a character by what he or she loathes.

"There is one good reason to go to school:  You want to do something that needs specific skills.  That's it.  Anything else is a hobby.  And going to university while you decide what you want to do is like skipping your skydiving lesson because you want to figure out the parachute during free fall."-Globe and Mail on Apr. 10, 2014 called “Breaking the education habit” by Dave Jorgensen

“It’s about after the party.  James and I talk about this kind of thing all the time.  You spend time thinking about the future when you’re younger.  Now that you’re here, what do I want to dream about the rest of my life.” –“After the party” Globe and Mail article.  It interviews the band Shins. Brian Burton (aka Danger Mouse) with the new album After the Disco Feb. 6, 2014

 

“Stardust captures memories of '60s: David Bailey as famous as those models, stars he photographed” by Mark Hudson, London Daily Telegraph on Feb. 07, 2014:

 

“They’re people I admire, people with a passion for what they do.  I’m not really interested in them as photographers.  I’m not really interested in photography, I’m only interested in what it can do.”

"There was something magic in the way the image appeared. I'd always done a lot of drawing and painting. When you're dyslexic, that's all you could do at school. But I hadn't put the two things, photography and art, together.

"It's about portraiture, not models," he says, then scrutinizes the image of Deneuve for a moment. "She was great," he says. "I loved her. I still love her. Just because you can't live with someone, doesn't mean you don't love them.”

"I'm interested in people," he says, "and whatever you see in the photograph, whether you call it glamour or drama or edge, it's already in that person. It's finding it and bringing it out.”

May 7 Rock band Islands question: I was reading in the Edmonton Journal on Mar. 26, 2014 called "On the Edges of the Big Time" by Mike Bell.  Here’s the beginning of the article:

Why aren't you more successful? Don't ask Nick Thorburn this question, even if your intentions are good, and you mean it in the nicest way.

"It's one of the most annoying questions that can be asked after a show. As though I have some kind of control over the fate of my music and how it's received commercially or critically. It's really funny," says the songwriter behind Canadian alt pop act Islands, while on tour in Germany, where he's hearing the query on a nightly basis.

"But it's a constant question that I've only just started noticing, like people almost seem upset with me as though I'm holding back. And they don't understand, they're perplexed."

My opinion: I’m not a fan of the band, but I thought that was really interesting.  You can not control how your work is going to be received commercially or critically.  There are some things you can predict. 

I know when I am going to write about a MADtv sketch in my email/ blog post, I will always forewarn you and say: “This may be offensive to some people, so be prepared.”

This belongs in my writing email because I’ve had Tracy’s blog since 2008.  I was to be discovered by it.  I also send my script pitches out often and producers read it.  I can’t control if they will like the script or not.

http://www2.canada.com/edmontonjournal/news/story.html?id=93b09736-1f28-4785-a415-abe0dfa9d657

Alison Peck reviewing the book The Snow Queen by Michael Cunningham.  The article is called "The varieties of religious experience" in the Globe and Mail on May 24, 2014:

“His ability to sell a book for 52 dollars based on 14 days of reporting is an inspiration to all aspiring writers labouring in the desiccated publishing vineyards all across this big blue marble.” Stephen Rodrick reviewing the book Another Great Day at Sea: Life Aboard the USS George H.W. Bush by Heoff Dyer. 

“He is taken aback by the event (saw a light in the sky) and struggles to understand it, to incorporate it into his sense of himself and the world around him.

‘Although he’s seen some something extraordinary,’ writes Cunningham, ‘and hopes it isn’t the precursor of a modern ailment he failed find on the internet, he has not been instructed, he has not been transformed, there’s been no message or command, and he is exactly who he was last night.

However.  The question arises: Who was he last night?  Has he in fact been altered in some subtle way, or has he simply been rendered more conscious of the particulars of his ongoing condition?”

“It does seem, however, that Dido Belle is a role Mbatha-Raw was born to play – as proof, she stayed with the project for the seven years it took to pull financing together. Because it’s a British story, she contends, it’s about class as much as race. “Society defines you as something, but you don’t have to accept that,” she says.” – The Globe and Mail article “Being biracial is not a modern concept” by Johanna Schneller on May 10, 2014.  

Jun. 4 TED conference: I cut out the Globe and Mail article “The instants that sparked the ideas” by Marsha Lederman on Mar. 22, 2014:

Elizabeth Gilbert:

 

Elizabeth Gilbert produced a massive bestseller with Eat, Pray, Love, but that came with its share of terror. How to follow up such a huge success? She felt certain that fans of her memoir would be disappointed with whatever she wrote next. She considered giving up writing altogether.

She, weirdly, found herself identifying with her younger self – an unpublished waitress in a diner coming home daily to a mailbox stuffed with rejection letters for almost six years. It made no sense. What did constant failure have to do with success beyond her wildest dreams?

Here’s what she discovered: The answer, in both cases, was to keep doing the thing she loved not for the end game but for the activity itself. It was her love of writing that inspired her writing.

“That’s how, in 2010, I was able to publish the dreaded follow up to Eat, Pray, Love. And you know what happened? It bombed. And I was fine. Actually I kind of felt bulletproof because I knew that I’d broken the spell and that I’d find my way back home to writing for the sheer devotion of it.”

Sting: For Sting, it was a glimpse of a different kind of life that provided motivation to get out of his shipyard building town, Newcastle, and what seemed his inevitable future working there. That shipyard at the end of his street made some of the biggest vessels in the world. So big, that sometimes royalty would show up on launch day. When Sting (then Gordon Sumner) was a boy, he remembers the Queen Mother coming to town for one of those events. He stood at the side of the road, in front of his house, wearing his Sunday best and holding a Union Jack. Finally, her Rolls-Royce drew near.

“I started to wave my flag vigorously and there is the Queen Mother,” the superstar musician told the audience. “I see her and she seems to see me, she acknowledges me. She waves, and she smiles. And I wave my flag more vigorously. We’re having a moment, me and the Queen Mother. She’s acknowledged me. And then she’s gone. Well, I wasn’t cured of anything. It was the opposite, actually. I was infected. I was infected with an idea. I don’t belong on this street. I don’t want to live in that house. I don’t want to end up in that shipyard. I want to be in that car. I want a bigger life. I want a life beyond this town. I want a life that’s out of the ordinary.”

My opinion: I never read any of Elizabeth Gilbert books, but the above was inspirational.  I’m going to put it in my inspirational quotes.  I’m not really a fan of Sting’s, but I liked his part in the article too.  The rest of the article talks to Sting and the artist Lars Jan.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/ted-conference-the-instants-that-sparked-the-ideas/article17611869/?cmpid=rss1

City entrepreneur tapped pop culture David Finlayson, Edmonton Journal on Sept. 24 2010:

 

“I’m so happy with my home life, I’m happy with my career.  Am I disappointed that I haven’t had my big break yet?  Yes.  But I look back at my career as these series of small breaks that are leading up to something.  I haven’t given up yet.  If nothing major ever happens, my hope is that I have a lot of fun in my life and part of that fun is doing creative projects with friends and clients.  That’s basically my life right now.”-Holden Daniels, singer, songwriter, producer.  Edmonton Journal article “Harnessing Youtube’s power” on Feb. 26, 2014

"Write down the 10 things that make you happy, and then the 10 things that make you happy at work, and see how fast you become successful." 

"The most important factor in creating change is understanding the future, not reacting to the present. If you do the same things you did yesterday, why the hell would you change?" 

Peter van Stolk turned out to be very smart when he founded the Jones Soda Company in Edmonton in 1996, but he also did a lot of crazy things to get his product noticed. 

“Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man’s character, give him power.”- Abraham Lincoln

"It doesn’t matter who you are, or where you came from. The ability to triumph begins with you. Always."- Oprah Winfrey

“As knowledge increases, wonder deepens.”-Charles Morgan, English writer.  1894-1858