I've never had writer's block.
I think the Republican budget priorities are messed up. I salute for the way they're attacking some of the entitlement programs, but they are taking huge cuts, by pretending they're just block-granting it to the states, out of Medicaid, from the least fortunate.
Bucky Katt: A bad writer is just a good writer with writer's block.
Repression is good for cultural achievement. Let's face it. What are gay boys going to be like? I always like to say the 19th-century gay boy was Oscar Wilde, the 20th-century gay boy was Stonewall and ACT UP. And in the 21st century, we have blocking people on Grindr. That's what we've accomplished. Without some kind of traction.
I've heard people say that [I have a short attention span]. I don't feel I do, because when I'm interested in something I'll stay in focus as long as it is necessary... If you get off on something I'm not very interested in, it's very easy for me to block it out. It's easy for me to block things out.
Plot and scene are still the hardest things for me, though I think they're the building blocks of what makes a story work.
I'm working with fragments a lot of the time and the connective tissue isn't there yet. I think of it the way comics work. You have a block here and a block here, and there's this white space in between. Somehow your mind makes the leap to connect those two blocks. Finding a way to trick your mind into connecting those blocks is one of the fun things for me about writing. You can have those leaps that will emerge into something, if you're lucky.
You'd better put sunblock on that skeleton head of yours. You're gonna fry." -Bobby
Block Watch, Crime Watch, we have hundreds of thousands of Americans, every day and night, risking their lives, going out for no pay as volunteers, protecting Americans like all of you and not asking anything in return. And the other day I'm speaking in a high school in New Jersey and the youngsters go, oh, you're just like Zimmerman.
I've buried six Guardian Angels who have been shot and killed in the line of duty. I was stalked myself, had a gunman go pow, pow, pow, pow, pow, pow, five hollow point bullets, God save me. What do you think this is? This isn't Zimmerman. But unfortunately, he's become the face of Block Watch, Crime Watch.
I was staying in a hotel in San Francisco for a couple of nights, before flying back to the UK. My hotel was a desperate grey block made from paper and people’s screams. At night the sound of strangers having icy sex echoed off the building and poured through the broken air conditioning, like tiny daggers I couldn't see, reminding me of just the tip of what I was missing.
Some days I am the flower beneath the machine. And the machine rolls slowly on, blocking the sun, without a care for what it tramples beneath.
Everybody is talking and everybody is trying to block things out, but eventually you just yell, "Action!," everybody starts moving, the camera starts going, and you get a take.
If surgeons don't get surgeon's block, then why are you allowed to get writer's block?
Is there anything in the world better than words on the page? Magic signs, the voices of the dead, building blocks to make wonderful worlds better than this one, comforters, companions in loneliness. Keepers of secrets, speakers of the truth...all those glorious words.
Meggie Folchart: Having writer's block? Maybe I can help. Fenoglio: Oh yes, that's right. You want to be a writer, don't you? Meggie Folchart: You say that as if it's a bad thing. Fenoglio: Oh no, it's just a lonely thing. Sometimes the world you create on the page seems more friendly and alive than the world you actually live in.
Becoming an actor wasn’t a choice – it was something I was forced into. At 3, you can’t make those choices... I supported my family, and if I got fired or missed an audition, I’d be punished as if I’d messed up in school. I was starved, because they wanted to keep my weight at a certain place; my hair was bleached – that was my life. I wasn’t allowed to play with kids on my block or ride a bike or play ball, in case I got a scratch – I wasn’t even allowed to be bar mitzvahed because I couldn’t attend enough lessons.
What dancing has helped me with is blocking; it makes me comfortable with my body. You know how to hit your mark, you know how to embody a swagger. But sitting down and looking across the table at another actor and being able to go to battle on screen is nothing to do with singing or dancing.
The thing I love about New York is getting lost but not worrying, just wandering and wandering, knowing that there's always a subway only ten blocks away in any direction. There's always a new neighborhood to discover, a new place to lose your bearings in, and yet however alien it seems you can escape. You can always get a cab. All of life's problems can be solved by hailing a cab.
Writer's block! It doesn't exist. You just long for ideas to go away so you have an idea of peace.
Now [Sue Grafton] loves writer's block, seeing it as a message from the psyche that the narrative is headed in the wrong direction.
On "[Total] Recall" also [sets were extraordinary], but this was next-level. They built two or three blocks of midtown Manhattan in 1926 and it was inhabited with 400 extras and 24 Model Ts and a train system and all that kind of nonsense. It was madness. You would walk into shops and they would have the goods from that period, it was just huge.
Life is a series of diminishments. Each cessation of an activity either from choice or some variety of infirmity is a death, a putting to final rest. Each loss, of friend or precious enemy, can be equated with the closing off of a room containing blocks of nerves, or a dynamo governing a particular sensibility or intelligence and soon after the closing off the nerves atrophy and that part of oneself, in essence, drops away. The self is lightened, is held on earth by a gram less of mass and will.
Much has already been learned about the arrogance of the IRS from the House investigations of the agency's targeting of conservatives. The revelations emerged despite strenuous efforts by Democrats in Washington and by the IRS itself to block inquiries and deny the existence of political targeting - targeting that the former head of the IRS Exempt Organizations Unit, Lois Lerner, eventually acknowledged and apologized for in May 2013.
One thing about winning a Pulitzer, it means you know what the first three words of your obituary will be: Pulitzer Prize-winner. After winning the Pulitzer, I couldn't help but notice how people suddenly looked at me with a newfound respect, and would say, "He's an expert." On the negative side, I developed a terrible case of writer's block for awhile, because I felt like readers would expect every one of my columns to be prize worthy.
