““The great rewrite man, a Pulitzer Prize winner, has the ability, Strum says, “to take scores and scores of scraps and turn them into a beautiful, coherent story, all fully attributed. He asks the reporters who do his legwork, ‘How many steps up to the apartment building where the dead man was found? Did he [...]
“Take the writers out of the classes, put them in dark cells with a plug for their monitors, a slot at the top of the door for pizza and a slot at the bottom for waste. Every time a finished story comes back out that top slot, you write them a check for a thousand [...]
“Ecstasy is delicious. Or, put it another way, Ecstasy is delicious and I recommend highly, loudly and long that everyone whose health — physical and psychological — does not contraindicate or preclude its ingestion, ought to ingest it. Young/old, man/woman, rich/poor, gay/straight, black/white, saint/sinner, genius/dolt, Christian and Jew and Muslim, Democrat, Republican and Independent, lawmaker [...]
“And I stick burning leaves in my foodhole. So, as a matter of fact, do Kurt Vonnegut, Molly Ivins, Susan Brownmiller, Vaclac Havel, and Lech Walesa. So did Pablo Picasso, Mary McCarthy, FDR, and George Sand. Charles Kuralt couldn’t get to LA from New York without flying first to Antwerp or to Mexico City, which [...]
“At the end of the day, if you can do anything else — telemarketing, pharmaceutical sales, or ditch-digging, major league umpire — I would suggest you do that because being a writer blows: it’s like having homework for the rest of your life.” — Hank Moody, protagonist of Californication, played by David Duchovny
Interviewer Have you read The Da Vinci Code? Umberto Eco Yes, I am guilty of that too. Interviewer That novel seems like a bizarre little offshoot of Foucault’s Pendulum. Eco The author, Dan Brown, is a character from Foucault’s Pendulum. I invented him. He shares my characters’ fascinations — the world conspiracy of Rosicrucians, Masons, and Jesuits. The role of the Knights [...]
"Happiness is not easy. It's not for the weak, the timid, the wishy-washy, the easily dissuaded, or the uncertain. Happiness is not for wimps. Happiness requires courage, stamina, persistence, fortitude, perseverance, bravery, boldness, valor, vigor, concentration, solidity, substance, backbone, grit, guts, moxie, nerve, pluck, resilience, spunk, tenacity, tolerance, will power, chutzpah, and a good thesaurus."
“There are those who say that all we can learn from history is that we never learn from history. Perhaps that is an extreme position…But if history can give us no foresight whatever, and perhaps little hindsight, what can it give us? History gives us a knowledge of men. Not the abstract knowledge we derive [...]
James Fenton, who reported on the 1986 EDSA Revolution, expresses his thoughts about the Ninoy Aquino assassination.
From an October 9, 1993 Philippines Free Press article entitled Response by Adrian Cristobal, a speech read by the late Filipino writer immediately after Teodoro L. Locsin Jr. delivered the opening remarks for the launch of Pasquinades, Cristobal’s collection of columns. In his speech, which was also published in the same issue, Locsin said [...]
