I was taking my first uncertain steps towards writing for children when my own were young. Reading aloud to them taught me a great deal when I had a great deal to learn. It taught me elementary things about rhythm and pace, the necessary musicality of text.
What our eyes behold may well be the text of life but one's meditations on the text and the disclosures of these meditations are no less a part of the structure of reality.
Who on earth is going to use 'utilize' in a text message, a whopping seven characters including the always-hard-to-type 'z,' when you can say the exact same thing in three characters? I can't think of a sentence in which 'use' can't replace 'utilize.'
I'd always liked to write, but I never wanted to be a writer, because it seemed a sissy occupation. It is. To this day, I find it terribly easy. And so, rather than trying to hunt up a text, I just wrote one.
When I grew up in the early '90s, the new World Wide Web felt like a gimmick, and I had no idea of the changes in store. In the summers, I'd backpack through Europe, follow the Grateful Dead. I had a car and a tent and traveled around the Great Lakes and out West. Jack Kerouac was my guiding light, his 'On the Road' a sacred text.
Remember daydreams? No, of course you don't. How could you? Three new text messages have just arrived, and another three, in a moment, will go out.
You know, kids text a lot today. It's phenomenal.
People live too much of their lives on email or the Internet or text messages these days. We're losing all of our communication skills.
We have cut the text, but what remains are Shakespeare's words.
With vocal and choral music, first and foremost, it's the text. Not only do I need to serve the text, but the text - when I'm doing it right - acts as the perfect 'blueprint', and all the architecture is there. The poet has done the heavy lifting, so my job is to find the soul of the poem and then somehow translate that into music.
People still text me to say that there is something about me in the paper, and what really annoys me is that if it's nasty, I then have to go and have a look, even though actually I don't want to know.
Acting is just a process of relaxation, actually. Knowing the text so well and trusting that the instinct and the subconscious mind, whatever you want to call it, is going to take over.
I see people putting text messages on the phone or computer and I think, 'Why don't you just call?'
I think of myself as a problem-solver. I want to go in and help the director and the writer to get the best they can out of the text they're working with.
One thing about my dinner parties - they're never planned. I go to the grocery store, and I buy whatever is on sale. I get a lot of it, and I just send out a mass text: 'I just bought food. Dinner's at 8. Text me if you're coming.'
This is the most intimate relationship between literature and its readers: they treat the text as a part of themselves, as a possession.
Compare sending someone a text message and getting a love letter delivered by carrier pigeon. No contest.
If a book I've committed myself to review turns out to be 'disappointing' I make an effort to present it objectively to the reader, including a good number of excerpts from the text, so that the reader might form his or her own opinion independent of my own.
Then one day I thought it would be wonderful to make a whole book, to make my text and my drawings together, and that's how I started doing children's books.
All actors bring something unexpected to the role because they have to translate what's on the page and make a real character out of the black-and-white text that's there in the script.
The poem is a form of texting... it's the original text. It's a perfecting of a feeling in language - it's a way of saying more with less, just as texting is.
What is the biggest public forum in the United States? We were told it's the Super Bowl. The ad shows kids working at blue-collar jobs, and the final statement is just written text: Who's going to pay for the trillion dollar deficit?
When you post something, when you text something, you lose ownership of it when you hit enter or send. Who you send it to, where you post it, they take ownership of that information whether you like it or not. Unfortunately, you don't lose responsibility for that text or post.
When you make as many speeches and you talk as much as I do and you get away from the text, it's always a possibility to get a few words tangled here and there.
No poem, not even Shakespeare or Milton or Chaucer, is ever strong enough to totally exclude every crucial precursor text or poem.
Music is the melody whose text is the world.
You learn your text and have it in the back of your head, without a thought as to how you're going to say it.
Every status update you read on Facebook, every tweet or text message you get from a friend, is competing for resources in your brain with important things like whether to put your savings in stocks or bonds, where you left your passport, or how best to reconcile with a close friend you just had an argument with.
How arrogant - how very far from humility - would be the self-satisfied, smug assurance that God, a tidy-up-after-us God will come and clean up our mess? Hope for a nanny God, who will with a miracle grant us amnesty from our folly - that's not aligned with either history or the text of the Bible.
When people read a novel 600 pages long, six months pass, and all they will remember are five pages. They don't remember the text - instead, they remember the sensations the text gives them.
I think that classical theater training is just one aspect of acting. I think that experience of having worked with a lot of text can help you as an actor. It gives you the ability to tackle a larger than life character in parts that require it.
If it is true that there is always more than one way of construing a text, it is not true that all interpretations are equal.
I don't care how someone lives or how good their spoken English is. I do all of my interviews on Skype text chat - all that matters is their work.
I look for people who're passionate, dedicated to the text, and in whom I trust completely.
I have lots of brothers and sisters, two of whom are younger than myself, so I rely on my phone, text messaging or e-mailing to stay in the loop and communicate when I'm away for big chunks of time.
The primary goal of the so-called nonfiction text is to relay the facts of an event - the facts about a person, the facts of history - which is not why I turned to this genre.