Sometimes during a show or a film, while you're shooting it, you'll think, "This is great, it's going to be fantastic, the script is incredible, and the actors are great, and everything is working out brilliantly." And then you see it, and you kind of go, "Oh god, it's not as good as I thought it was," and it doesn't get an audience to watch it. It only does a couple of festivals and then dies and whatever.
Some persons have contended that mathematics ought to be taught by making the illustrations obvious to the senses. Nothing can be more absurd or injurious: it ought to be our never-ceasing effort to make people think, not feel.
You think slavery is right and ought to be extended; while we think it is wrong and ought to be restricted. That I suppose is the rub. It certainly is the only substantial difference between us.
It's not a bad idea to call this Cthulhuism & Yog-Sothothery of mine "The Mythology of Hastur" - although it was really from Machen & Dunsany & others, rather than through the Bierce-Chambers line, that I picked up my gradually developing hash of theogony - or daimonogony. Come to think of it, I guess I sling this stuff more as Chambers does than as Machen & Dunsany do - though I had written a good deal of it before I ever suspected that Chambers ever wrote a weird story!
For the longest time, I was just playing music and not really expecting any success - just kind of doing it because I liked doing it. While doing that, I went on a lot of shitty tours, playing to nobody, so I think it makes me appreciate it. Our band the New Pornographers have been popular for a few years now, but it still shocks me. I remember thinking we were hugely popular when we sold 15,000 records, and now this one sold 30,000 in two weeks. I'm grateful for the whole thing.
Deadlines refine the mind. They remove variables like exotic materials and processes that take too long. The closer the deadline, the more likely you'll start thinking waaay outside the box.
If the devil tells you something is too fearful to look at, look at it. If he says something is too terrible to hear, hear it. If you think some truth unbearable, bear it.
It's no good starting out by thinking one is a heaven-born genius- some people are, but very few. No, one is a tradesman - a tradesman in a good honest trade. You must learn the technical skills, and then, within that trade, you can apply your own creative ideas, but you must submit them to the discipline of form.
Sin is to a nature what blindness is to an eye. The blindness of an evil or defect which is a witness to the fact that the eye was created to see the light and, hence, the very lack of sight is the proof that the eye was meant... to be the one particularly capable of seeing the light. Were it not for this capacity, there would be no reason to think of blindness as a misforture.
Remembering that Peter denied his Lord with an oath, after most solemnly protesting that he never would, I will not swear I will make no committals; but I do think I will not.
I think it is absurd to give such tremendous importance to the distinctions between men and women. When I meet someone I regard that person as a human being. I do not say "This is a man; this is a woman."
I don't like to veer away from the truth because I think that's what people have fallen in love with about my music. It's honest. I can't portray to you something that I've never been through or something I didn't watch someone close to me go through. It's the best way for people to get to me know.