How much energy is wasted in Italy in trying to write the novel that obeys all the rules. The energy might have been useful to provide us with more modest, more genuine things, that had less pretensions: short stories, memoirs, notes, testimonials, or at any rate, books that are open, without a preconceived plan.

Purple has always been my favorite color... but purple, when I was a little kid, was a color that boys weren't really allowed to wear. That's what all the kids at school told me. I filled my wardrobe with as much purple as I could possibly find, because who cares? Life's too short to dress by other people's rules.

Faulkner's 'As I Lay Dying' had an immense effect on me, and most of my novels bear the burn marks of this experience, those short chapters with their conflicting points of view, truth expressed by multiple perspectives. The other attractive thing about 'As I Lay Dying' was the way it gave rich voices to the poor.

Why do I like to write short stories? Well, I certainly didn't intend to. I was going to write a novel. And still! I still come up with ideas for novels. And I even start novels. But something happens to them. They break up. I look at what I really want to do with the material, and it never turns out to be a novel.

Life is short, youth is finite, and opportunities endless. Have you found the intersection of your passion and the potential for world-shaping positive impact? If you don't have a great idea of your own, there are plenty of great teams that need you - unknown startups and established teams in giant companies alike.

Everything I was told should be my greatest insecurities and weaknesses, everything that I've been labeled - short, nerdy, skinny, weak, impulsive, ugly, tomboy, poor, rebel, loud, freak, crazy - turned out to be my greatest strengths. I didn't become successful in spite of them. I became successful because of them.

After one hundred days of confinement following a bone marrow transplant, I rejoiced in taking short walks to a nearby park as I was writing 'Girl in Hyacinth Blue.' The uncertainty of my survival made every blade of grass gorgeous in its green intensity, lifting itself up, doing its part to make the world beautiful.

I worked on 'Blue Peter' and 'Tonight' and lots of TV plays, filmed people like Rudolf Nureyev and Ted Heath, and ended up a senior cameraman with my own crew. I'd had my first short story published in 1947, and when my writing really started to take off I decided to go freelance, and eventually left the BBC in 1965.

A Pike, in the California dialect, is a native of Missouri, Arkansas, Northern Texas, or Southern Illinois. The first emigrants that came over the plains were from Pike County, Missouri; but as the phrase, 'a Pike County man,' was altogether too long for this short life of ours, it was soon abbreviated into 'a Pike.'

In '77 there was no Internet, there was no Twitter or Facebook, and I think that, without being some old git who hates anything new, people's attention spans are too short. Back then you had 'Top Of The Pops' and 'Melody Maker,' and you had to make the effort to go to a show so that you absorbed the culture of music.

Imagine having all of your freedoms taken away, being forced to work against your will, and constantly living under the threat of violence - in short, being forced to live as a slave. Sadly, this situation is a reality for millions of children, women, and men each year as part of the global human trafficking industry.

I believe history will come to view 9/11 as an event on par with November 22, 1963, the date on which John F. Kennedy was murdered, cutting short a presidency that was growing ever more promising. Dreams died that day in Dallas; it is easy to imagine the 1960s turning out rather differently had President Kennedy lived.

The first phase of C was - really, it was two phases in short succession of, first, some language changes from B, really adding the type structure without too much change in the syntax, and doing the compiler. The second phase was slower; it all took place within a very few years, but it was a bit slower, so it seemed.

A lot of people tell me now I'm their inspiration. They say, 'I don't play baseball,' and then they mention whatever - engineer, doctor, college student, high school student - but they're hurt because, for some reason, people feel shame about themselves or embarrassed because they are short or skinny or fat or whatever.

My father and mother are both very smart people and I always felt I was a little short of the mark. So I would compensate with a character like Logan Cale. He's wearing glasses, he's in a wheelchair, he's a computer genius. He's very far away from who I am, but I really wanted to play roles where I'd be taken seriously.

If you knew that your life was merely a phase or short, short segment of your entire existence, how would you live? Knowing nothing 'real' was at risk, what would you do? You'd live a gigantic, bold, fun, dazzling life. You know you would. That's what the ghosts want us to do - all the exciting things they no longer can.

Stories of all lengths and depths come from different parts of the cave. For a novel, you must lay in mental, physical and spiritual provision as for a siege or for a time of hectic explosions, while a short story is, or can be, a steady, timed flame like the lighting of a blow lamp on a building site full of dry tinder.

The 1969 experience has been a rude awakening for many hedge-fund investors and has left some of them with strong reservations about the whole concept. For the first time in their relatively short history, the funds are not growing: in fact, some have suffered large withdrawals of capital, and a few have actually folded.

I always have the same problem when I try to buy something straight off the rack: If I put on a medium, it's perfectly fitted in the torso, but the sleeves are too short. If it's a large, the sleeves are long enough, but it's too baggy. So made-to-measure suits are especially important for me because I'm 6'2'' and so skinny.

The first 'Saturday Night Live' season I was heavily interested in was the one with Martin Short, Billy Crystal, and Christopher Guest. There was just something about Martin Short in particular. I really related to him and hung on his every word and mannerism, so I started impersonating all of his characters as an 8th grader.

The more you create, the more ambitious you become with your projects. Short films were a direct result of over 200 web series sketches and vlogs. After you create enough 2-minute videos, you start to wonder what else there is. Deadlines and discipline and quantity with a focus on quality have always been what keeps me going.

A writer can spend a decade working obsessively on a novel, but in the commerce of publishing, many of the most important decisions about any book will be made based on very short pitches - from literary agent to editor to sales rep to bookstore buyer to a potential reader standing in the bookstore, asking, 'What's it about?'

The Gross National Product measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country. It measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile, and it can tell us everything about America - except whether we are proud to be Americans.

Every man who has sat in the Oval Office has felt the short, sharp shock when an ordinary day in the highest office in the land shifts from pomp and ceremony to urgent briefings, immediate choices, crucial decisions where lives are on the line. It's not something that may happen to a president. It's something that will happen.

There was a wonderful little short four-year time period when marvelous things happened. It started in 1908, when the Wright brothers flew in Paris, and everybody said, 'Ooh, hey, I can do that.' There's only a few people that have flown in early 1908. In four years, 39 countries had hundreds of airplanes, thousands of pilots.

I think that the romantic impulse is in all of us and that sometimes we live it for a short time, but it's not part of a sensible way of living. It's a heroic path and it generally ends dangerously. I treasure it in the sense that I believe it's a path of great courage. It can also be the path of the foolhardy and the compulsive.

I'm happy to be on a winning team. My individual success, that lasts for a short period of time. The success of being a part of the South, of Atlanta, which is now the hot bed of music, that's what's gonna last the longest. The fact that I contributed to planting our flag and moving music to my city, that's what I'm most proud of.

Here's the thing, men have to also mature in how they see women, too. Because they need to understand that it's not just about how we look, it's about who we are. And I am going to tell you like this, 'If you can't love me with short hair, and you telling me I got to have long hair to be loved, guess what, I ain't the one for you.'

As hardware doubles its density every 18-24 months, courtesy of Moore's Law, and as software eats the world, technology will replace a broad swathe of jobs outright - from burger-flippers to diagnosticians - and atomize many others from full-time positions into gigs performed by many fungible workers. Tech, in short, will eat jobs.

I have about as much control over how I look as the guy who's short and looks more like a character actor - we both have the same drive to be actors and we both have the same drive to assume these different characters, it's just harder for me to get the chance because they look at me and say, 'Oh, he's this type,' and they stamp me.

There is a natural tendency for investors to devote a significant majority of their time to finding new ideas. After all, uncovering great companies selling at great prices is the lifeblood of successful investing. But in the never-ending quest for the next great idea, investors often give short shrift to their existing investments.

I once wrote a short story called 'The Best Blues Singer in the World,' and it went like this: 'The streets that Balboa walked were his own private ocean, and Balboa was drowning.' End of story. That says it all. Nothing else to say. I've been rewriting that same story over and over again. All my plays are rewriting that same story.

I've been planning a chunk of time to myself for years now. It's been my intention to finish 'Astonishing X-Men,' 'I Am Legion' and 'Planetary' and then sort of 'disappear' from doing comic interiors for a couple of years. I'll pop up here and there with a short story or two, old promises to friends and all, but no major series work.

Game Over is a very frustrating game convention. In short, it means, 'If you were not good enough or did not play the game the way the designer intended you to play, you should play again until you do it right.' What kind of story could a writer tell where the characters could play the same scene ten times until the outcome is right?

I've written out itineraries for baby sitters with years of experience. I've gotten up in the middle of the night and stood over my children's sleeping bodies just to make sure they're breathing, and breathing well. In short, I'm the worst Jewish mother in the world. I make Alexander Portnoy's mother look like a laid-back Earth mama.

Honestly, not being evasive, but the great thing about Bond is that I have fifty years of movies - 23 movies and all the Ian Fleming novels and short stories, all of which are fodder. And when I'm working on the new Bond, I'm constantly going back to Fleming and the other movies - what are the bits and pieces, what are the resonances?

In the early 1980s, the government of New Zealand fell into the hands of true believers, globalist believers, and they embraced the theory of inevitability perhaps more completely than anybody else. And it solved in the very short term some of their debt problems, but in the medium- and long-term, it left them in real economic trouble.

Off the floor, I'm really laid back: like, nothing really fazes me too much. But on the floor, I do get emotional and a little carried away. However, I started playing when I was 13 to have fun with my teammates, and that never stopped. I enjoy traveling and having fun in the locker room with the guys. Life is too short to be miserable.

My hair was so much a part of my personality and all my photo shoots. I hid behind my hair. And then, I just decided I was okay with myself. To have short hair and really show my face is even more revealing than anything. It's a statement - not to everyone else, more to myself. I'm just ready to get out from behind my hair and be myself.

We curate our lives around this perceived sense of perfection, because we get rewarded in these short term signals: Hearts, likes, thumbs up. We conflate that with value, and we conflate it with truth, and instead, what it really is is fake, brittle popularity that's short term and leaves you even more vacant and empty before you did it.

One's appearance bespeaks dignity corresponding to the depth of his character. One's concentrated effort, serene attitude, taciturn air, courteous disposition, thoroughly polite bearing, gritted teeth with a piercing look - each of these reveals dignity. Such outward appearance, in short, comes from constant attentiveness and seriousness.

Pope Francis emphatically does not buy the argument that poverty can be alleviated by the 'trickle down' effects of wealth creation. He is deaf to arguments that the global economy has brought a billion people out of poverty. He is convinced, in short, that the best and only way to expel poverty is fairer distribution of the world's goods.

The Premier League is what it is. Some people will see the intensity and quality as a great advantage for your players: it will make them better. Some will see it as a disadvantage because the players play at such a high level and such intensity, it's difficult for them to drum that up, that intensity, with a very short space of rest time.

In 2014, I knew my English was not so bad, but I had no confidence in talking directly to an English-speaking reporter. I had to do a short interview with, I think, Reuters from France. I was so nervous. I practiced memorizing three sentences for two hours. But, I think that these kinds of interviews make me develop a lot, and that helps me.

If you go from $7 to $15 in a very short period of time, potentially that could have a negative effect on some economies because that is a very big jump. And you're saying to businesses that employ a large number of minimum wage workers, your payroll is basically going to double. That could have a negative impact. It would have to be studied.

At the solemn moment of death, every man, even when death is sudden, sees the whole of his past life marshalled before him, in its minutest details. For one short instant the personal becomes one with the individual and all-knowing ego. But this instant is enough to show to him the whole chain of causes which have been at work during his life.

Anthony and I are putting together a company where we won't lose our jobs based on quarterly earnings and can afford to play a longer game. That short game is what creates a glut of mediocrity in the market because people are desperate for hits, and it puts so much pressure on executives to deliver them. We will take that pressure off the artists.

As Paretsky detailed in her short memoir Writing in an Age of Silence (2007), early optimism buoyed by the civil rights movement of the 1960s and early 1970s has, in her view, all but crumbled in the face of a bombardment of sadism and misogyny, the withholding of civil liberties, and the nation's move from proud speech into near-deafening silence.

When you're an engineer, you want to analyze things a lot. But if you believe that the most important data points are people, then you have to make conclusions in relatively short order. Because you want to push the people who are doing great. And you want to either develop the people who are not or, in a worst case, they need to be somewhere else.

'Sour Heart' is a collection of seven linked short stories narrated by young Chinese-American girls living in New York City in the '90s. It's exceptionally hard to describe what I've written without sounding delusional or boring, so I'll just say they are stories about growing up and the pleasures and agonies of having a family, a body, and a home.

Share This Page