Writers kid themselves-about themselves and other people. Take the talk about writing methods. Writing is just work-there's no secret. If you dictate or use a pen or type with your toes-it is just work.
Interpretation
Writing is a straightforward task that requires hard work, not secret techniques or methods.
Sinclair Lewis highlights the notion that many writers often overcomplicate the process of writing by believing in certain methods or secrets. In reality, the act of writing is primarily about dedicating time and effort; regardless of the tools used, it fundamentally remains a labor-intensive endeavor.
In practice
In a writer's workshop when discussing the challenges of the craft.
Upon this theology he rarely pondered. The kernel of his practical religion was that it was respectable, and beneficial to one's business, to be seen going to services; that the church kept the Worst Elements from being still worse; and that the pastor's sermons, however dull they might seem at the time of taking, yet had a voodooistic power which 'did a fellow good-- kept him in touch with Higher Things.
Intellectually I know that America is no better than any other country; emotionally I know she is better than every other country.
She did her work with the thoroughness of a mind which reveres details and never quite understands them.
Writing is just work-there's no secret. If you dictate or use a pen or type or write with your toes-it's still just work.
It is, I think, an error to believe that there is any need of religion to make life seem worth living.
There are dozens of young poets and fictioneers most of them a little insane in the tradition of James Joyce, who, however insane they may be, have refused to be genteel and traditional and dull.
A good design is not a democratic consensus.
One of the grotesqueries of present-day American life is the amount of reasoning that goes into displaying the wisdom secreted in bad movies while proving that modern art is meaningless. They have put into practice the notion that a bad art work cleverly interpreted according to some obscure Method is more rewarding than a masterpiece wrapped in silence.
I like so many different kinds of music that I've never allowed myself the limitations of one particular range.
Listen, acting is not surgery, it's entertainment. You're doing something to hopefully move people, to make them laugh, to transport them. But actors are vulnerable, and the reason we're vulnerable is that we're always trying to recreate human behaviour.
Poetry is more a threshold than a path.
I think I write in order to discover on my shelf a new book that I would enjoy reading, or to see a new play that would engross me.
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