Seriously, if you want to get inside the head of a stand-up comic, you could do a lot worse than reading Steve Martin's Born Standing Up, all about how he developed his career and his creativity as a comedian. Lots of what he talks about is relevant to anyone in the creative arts - you find yourself, your voice, your technique and then maybe luck calls.
An imaginative book renders us much more service at first, by stimulating us through its tropes, than afterward, when we arrive atthe precise sense of the author. I think nothing is of any value in books, excepting the transcendental and extraordinary.
I think that many managers we meet do take their roles as leaders very seriously and do a lot for their people. And they try to hone their skills by reading books and attending training. But then again, the number one problem is we get busy. We tend to forget that collectively we can accomplish more than we could ever do alone, and we need our people to feel a part of a positive, productive culture.
You will, I am sure, agree with me that... if page 534 only finds us in the second chapter, the length of the first one must have been really intolerable.
...so now, Mrs. Ramsay thought, she could return to that dream land, that unreal but fascinating place, the Manning's drawing-room at Marlow twenty years ago; where one moved about without haste or anxiety, for there was no future to worry about. She knew what had happened to them, what to her. It was like reading a good book again, for she knew the end of that story, since it had happened twenty years ago, and life, which shot down even from this dining-room table in cascades, heaven knows where, was sealed up there, and lay, like a lake, placidly between its banks.
In an article on Bunyan lately published in the "Contemporary Review" - the only article on the subject worth reading on the subject I ever saw (yes, thank you, I am familiar with Macaulay's patronizing prattle about "The Pilgrim's Progress") etc.
People are reading more and writing more because of the internet. So the virtual world is a way for me to listen to my readers and interact with my readers. It is a way that they can voice their opinion.
The fiction I've written and published is certainly inflected by the work of authors I was reading or translating at the time. One of my methods for developing my own voice in fiction, a process I am taking very slowly and deliberately, is through these very intense encounters with certain writers. Strength and power in fiction is being able to resist these intoxicating voices, recognizing that they are the signatures of other writers and not one's own.
The best way to encourage economic vitality and growth is to let people keep their own money.When you spend your own money, somebody's got to manufacture that which you're spending it on. You see, more money in the private sector circulating makes it more likely that our economy will grow. And, incredibly enough, some want to take away part of those tax cuts. They've been reading the wrong textbook. You don't raise somebody's taxes in the middle of a recession. You trust people with their own money. And, by the way, that money isn't the government's money; it's the people's money.
Reading is one of the true pleasures of life. In our age of mass culture, when so much that we encounter is abridged,adapted, adulterated, shredded, and boiled down, it is mind-easing and mind-inspiring to sit down privately with a congenial book.
Sometimes, reading a blog, which I do infrequently, I see that generations of Americans have been wilfully crippled, and can no longer spell or write a sentence.