Archive for the ‘ Living ’ Category

Plato

“Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.”

Henry David Thoreau

The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it.

Cary Tennis

“Remember that as a writer you must find your motivation internally, not in external rewards, and you work in opposition to the system, not as a supplicant to the system. Whatever contingent truces you have maintained with the system in order to participate in its orderly orgies of consumption and distribution, good for you. But you are not a part of the system. You are a free creative worker. You do not need the system to do your creating. You only need it as a utility to reach your audience, and increasingly not even for that. On the other hand, the system cannot create anything on its own. It can only manage and distribute. So it needs you. It needs you but it is not on your side. Remember that.”

Kevin Spacey

(a clip from Inside the Actors Studio)

Ben Hecht

“Responding to criticism is a foolish thing for a writer to do, and an unpleasant one.  It is much better to read only the advertisements of our work and not, briefly, your royalty reports.  These will tell you how popular you are.  How good you are, or are not, is a thing you should know only too well yourself.”

William Shakespeare

As an unperfect actor on the stage
Who with his fear is put besides his part,
Or some fierce thing replete with too much rage,
Whose strength’s abundance weakens his own heart.
So I, for fear of trust, forget to say
The perfect ceremony of love’s rite,
And in mine own love’s strength seem to decay,
O’ercharged with burden of mine own love’s might.
O, let my books be then the eloquence
And dumb presagers of my speaking breast,
Who plead for love and look for recompense
More than that tongue that more hath more express’d.
O, learn to read what silent love hath writ:
To hear with eyes belongs to love’s fine wit.

(Sonnet 23)

Truman Capote

“A boy has to peddle his book.”

Jose Rivera

“Only listen to those people who have a vested interest in your future.”

Edward Albee

“It is a tough racket.  It can be pretty heartbreaking, and you really have to, deep down, have a toughness to yourself, or you’re not going to be able to survive in the theater.”

David Mamet

“Be prepared, be early, never complain, help your fellows, figure it out – your capacity for work is vastly greater than you suppose.”