In this excerpt from Roald Dahl’s Boy, his mother asks if he wants to go to Oxford or Cambridge.
“No, thank you,” I said. “I want to go straight from school to work for a company that will send me to wonderful faraway places like Africa or China.”
You must remember that there was virtually no air [...]
In the following excerpt from Roald Dahl’s Boy, he’s left public school at 18 to take a job with Shell Oil company. He is taking their internal training courses and is learning the business.
…[E]very morning, six days a week, Saturdays included, I would dress neatly in a sombre grey suit, have breakfast at seven forty-five [...]
From the final Hold this Thought broadcast:
“In East of Eden, John Steinbeck writes:
‘A child may ask, “What is the world’s story about?” And a grown man or woman may wonder, “What way will the world go? How does it end and, while we’re at it, what’s the story about?”
I believe that there is one story [...]
By then, the veterans had developed an informal set of rules for themselves: Take the craft seriously ([Judi] Dench: “deadly”). Don’t take yourself seriously ([Patrick] Stewart: “That’s death to creativity”). Never think you know it all (Dench: “Absolutely fatal”).
Ian McKellen: The Player – TIME
A few years ago, I read and enjoyed Alice W. Flaherty’s memoir, The Midnight Disease. Suffering from postpartum depression after the death of her newborn child, she began experiencing hypergraphia — the uncontrollable urge to write. She filled pages and pages with her writing, and couldn’t stop — the opposite of writer’s block.
Flaherty is a [...]