Abandon the idea that you are ever going to finish. Lose track of the 400 pages and write just one page for each day, it helps. Then when it gets finished, you are always surprised.

Forget your generalized audience. In the first place, the nameless, faceless audience will scare you to death and in the second place, unlike the theater, it doesn’t exist. In writing, your audience is one single reader. I have found that sometimes it helps to pick out one person—a real person you know, or an imagined person and write to that one.

If a scene or a section gets the better of you and you still think you want it—bypass it and go on. When you have finished the whole you can come back to it and then you may find that the reason it gave trouble is because it didn’t belong there.

If there is a magic in story writing, and I am convinced there is, no one has ever been able to reduce it to a recipe that can be passed from one person to another. The formula seems to lie solely in the aching urge of the writer to convey something he feels important to the reader.

a bad story is only an ineffective story.

The act of writing out your thoughts is a direct aid to concentration, and tends to enforce the habit of choosing the best language. It gives clearness, force, precision, beauty, and copiousness of style, so valuable in extemporaneous and impromptu speaking.

One eminent speaker used practically no gesture; another was in almost constant action. One was quiet, modest, and conversational in his speaking style; another was impulsive and resistless as a mountain torrent.

“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”

Twitter is not a public square controlled by a socialist government – it is a private company in a capitalist economy for the purpose of making money through advertising. Twitter has ZERO interest in promoting the public good.

Congressmembers would have better expertise on tech matters if the Office of Technology Assessment still existed. It was defunded in 1995 under Newt Gingrich’s “Contract to America” plan, because it was an unbiased organization that wouldn’t cow to political narratives. The Chew hearing is one of many instances that highlight both why Newt wanted to defund it, and why eliminating the agency was a detriment to politicians. (Ironically, Newt suggested shortly after the midterms that Republicans should come around to using TikTok to court young voters, despite the allegations of the app’s security risk.) Hopefully, someone in Congress will introduce legislation aimed at reviving the OTA somewhere down the line.

"The industrial revolution made the production of an instrument like [the piano] possible. Several planks of wood - six I think in this case - are overlaid and pressed into shape by tremendous force for six months. Nature is molded into shape. Many tons of force and pressure are applied, making the strings what they are. Matter taken from nature is molded by human industry, by the sum strength of civilization. Nature is forced into shape. Interestingly, the piano requires re-tuning. We humans say, 'It falls out of tune', but that's not exactly accurate - matter is struggling to return to a natural state. The tsunami, in one moment, became a force of restoration. The [tsunami-damaged] piano re-tuned by nature actually sounds good to me now. In short, the piano is tuned by force to please our ears or ideals; it's a condition that feels natural to us humans. But from nature's perspective, it's very unnatural. I think deep inside me somewhere, I have a strong aversion to that."

The whole nature vs civilization narrative, is a story told by happy regressors, who want to return to a ilusionary before time, were all things were harmony and civilization was not. It is of course, a call for mass murder on billions of humans with the rumbling instincts from the brain stem and guts as justification. Were it justified with any other argument, civilized society would tear them to shreds, but in the robe of the shaman, they are exempt from the duty of reasoning.None the less, his music is great and can be enjoyed, like any other artists, without listening to the political and culture drivel that artists sadly often produce. They are easily captured and swayed by instinct tautological ideologies.Just because it feels right does not mean it to be true.My favorite rendition of his "My love wears forbidden colors"