You can really help support a character if you understand the setting. So for that reason I generally write about Philadelphia.
I'm a stylist, so I've been conditioned to setting up my own clothes like a fitting.
I prefer to make my own coffee at home because I love the experience of measuring out the beans and finding the right grind setting, messing with water amounts, etc. It's truly an art form, and I'm obsessed with it. In L.A., I love Blue Bottle and Intelligentsia and used to hang at Bru in Los Feliz.
I am in a traditional financial services business - but we at Fidelity can see that the evolution of technology is setting our industry up for disruption. What if this technology could do for the transfer of value what the Internet did for the transfer of information?
Many working mothers feel guilty about not being at home. And when they are there, they wish it could be perfect. This pressure to make every minute happy puts working parents in a bind when it comes to setting limits and modifying behavior.
With a smaller setting, you have a lot more freedom and flexibility within a given moment, but not necessarily the velocity you have with a big band.
Many of my books are set in New Jersey because that's where I was born and raised. I lived there until my kids finished elementary school. Then we moved to New Mexico, the setting for 'Tiger Eyes.'
Comparing and contrasting is a valuable human skill - and not just during high school English exams. Our ability to rank-order things is invaluable in making choices and setting priorities.
If you ever see me in a social setting wearing any sort of sportswear, then you know I'm in crisis.
However, the difficulties and pleasures of the writing itself are similar for a novel with a historical setting and a novel with a contemporary setting, as far as I'm concerned.
The public/private partnerships are taking various forms in India. It is individuals who are socially oriented are setting up schools. They're setting up colleges. They're setting up universities. They're setting up primary-education schools in the villages, particularly the villages their original families came from.
I feel like my experience on 'Community' was that I saw just how important that first year is for a series. That is where you work all the pieces out, and that means honing the characters' voices, setting that tone, finding your angle.
It takes a lot of work to be a great mother, a great daughter, and a great friend. All those things take effort, and I think, after having my daughter, she opened up this fearlessness within me, and I'm setting an example for her.
'Trilogy' was more of a claustrophobic body of work. Before it was released, I hadn't left my city for 21 years, and I had never been on a plane, not once. I spent my entire life on one setting; that's probably why pieces of the album feel like one long track, because that's what my life felt like. It felt like one long song.
The Elgin Marbles were supposed to be on the Parthenon. For many works of art, a museum is an artificial setting - a zoo, not a natural habitat.
The primary requisite for writing well about food is a good appetite. Without this, it is impossible to accumulate, within the allotted span, enough experience of eating to have anything worth setting down.
I've always been interested in setting my stories against a big event, the importance of which my younger readers are slowly becoming aware of as they move into their teens.
Sweet lordie, there is nothing more fun than getting people in a room to talk about their relationships - in a setting that everyone knows is light and fun but also real.
I think, my own personal view is there should be higher and higher levels of autonomy; government should not interfere in setting up colleges, in running colleges. The market, the society will decide which is a good university, which is not a good university, rather than government mandating.
Any setting can be a good setting for a novel.
For me, screenwriting is all about setting characters in motion and as a writer just chasing them. They should tell you what they'll do in any scene you put them in.
Democratic strategists and operatives should not design a strategy based off today's conditions. They should be setting a strategy for where the trajectory of polling is headed.
The Kurds were the only people in Iraq who were completely unguarded in expressing their gratitude to the United States for setting them free.
A victim is a victim is a victim. We should stop setting up standards that say we will have one standard of law enforcement for one group of victims but not for another.
Some people fascinate me. They really worship at the altar of their careers, you know? And it's terrifying. It's sort of like setting a table and waiting for someone to come along and whoosh - push all the plates onto the floor.
How often I found where I should be going only by setting out for somewhere else.
If you set out to write an adjective novel, you're setting out to write a mediocre novel; your allegiance is to the adjective, not to the story, and then that just sucks all the joy right out of it.
The main question in drama, the way I was taught, is always, 'What does the protagonist want?' That's what drama is. It comes down to that. It's not about theme, it's not about ideas, it's not about setting, but what the protagonist wants.
What I love about 'The Chew' is that we have these celebrities come on, and you get to see them in a different light, cooking or enjoying food, when we usually don't see them in that setting. So it's a lot of fun for their fans to see them be normal people and having that commonality of food.
In the same way that a mundane object can have a personality somehow, I try to suggest that a mundane setting can have some menace behind it.
In 1972 through '74, right before we hit it big, we were hauling our own equipment into the club and setting up and playing for, I don't know, a hundred bucks a night.
Employees can make happiness when they maximize their brainwork voluntarily and enthusiastically. Management should focus on setting up an atmosphere.
Slipstream fiction is usually defined as fiction with a contemporary setting in which story elements are mimetic (that is, seem real) - except for one or two eerie strangenesses. Unlike outright fantasy, these are not explained or integrated into an alternate-reality setting.
In 2011, I did an internship in Seven Dials, a junction in London where seven roads come together. I'd given up on writing after multiple rejections for my first novel, and I was starting to consider a career in publishing instead, but Seven Dials gave me such a strong idea for a setting that I couldn't resist picking up my pen again.
The great medley of Oregon and California emigrants, at their camps around Independence, had heard reports that several additional parties were on the point of setting out from St. Joseph's farther to the northward.
Every time I lock my people in a spacecraft or land them on an asteroid, the blood wells up again, and I'm writing horror. Horror's my default setting. It's also where I prefer to write.