You will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realize how seldom they do.
David Foster WallaceRead
No one can call themselves a writer until he or she has written at least fifty stories.
Interpretation
True writers must produce a significant body of work to earn the title.
This quote by David Foster Wallace emphasizes the idea that the label of 'writer' is not simply a title one can assume; it requires demonstrable effort and output. By suggesting that one must write at least fifty stories, Wallace points to the importance of practice, dedication, and accumulation of experiences in the journey to becoming a true writer.
In practice
A writing workshop discussion about what it means to be a writer.
You will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realize how seldom they do.
Everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute center of the universe, the realest, most vivid and important person in existence.
It seems important to find ways of reminding ourselves that most 'familiarity' is meditated and delusive.
Under fun's new administration, writing fiction becomes a way to go deep inside yourself and illuminate precisely the stuff you don't want to see or let anyone else see, and this stuff usually turns out (paradoxically) to be precisely the stuff all writers and readers share and respond to, feel.
Acceptance is usually more a matter of fatigue than anything else.
Bliss - a-second-by-second joy and gratitude at the gift of being alive, conscious - lies on the other side of crushing, crushing boredom. Pay close attention to the most tedious thing you can find (Tax Returns, Televised Golf) and, in waves, a boredom like youβve never known will wash over you and just about kill you. Ride these out, and itβs like stepping from black and white into color. Like water after days in the desert. Instant bliss in every atom.
Clever, but schoolteacher beat him anyway to show him that definitions belonged to the definers - not the defined.
There's no doubt who was a leader in space after the Apollo Program. Nobody came close to us. And our education system, in science, technology, engineering and math, was at the top of the world. It's no longer there. We're descending rather rapidly.
What a blessing it is to love books as I love them;- to be able to converse with the dead, and to live amidst the unreal!
I want a little black girl to pick up my book one day and see herself as the star. I want her to know that she's beautiful, and she matters, and she can have a crazy, magical adventure even if an ignorant part of the world tells her she can never be Hermione Granger.
Sacrifice. Work. Self-discipline. I teach these things, and my boys don't forget them when they leave.
Let me put it this way: when I read, I learned the world was not as small as my house. And that everybody in my home town was not representative of the way people in the world were raised. And that was what saved me.
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