I write description in longhand because that's hardest for me and you're closer to the paper when you work by hand, but I use the typewriter for dialogue because people speak like a typewriter works.
What is a movie star? A movie star is many things. They can be tall, short, thin, or skinny. They can be Democrats... or skinny.
Every legend, moreover, contains its residuum of truth, and the root function of language is to control the universe by describing it.
My task, which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel--it is, before all, to make you see.
That's the whole problem with science. You've got a bunch of empiricists trying to describe things of unimaginable wonder.
I certainly knew from an early age... how to tell stories; how to create pictures in other people's heads.
Words are capable of making experience more vivid, and also of organizing it. They can scare us, and they can comfort us.
It is hard indeed to notice anything for which the languages available to us have no description.
For me, good description usually consists of a few well-chosen details that will stand for everything else.
A singer is someone who puts out an album. That's a very generous description.
Matter-of-fact descriptions make the improbable seem real.
Once you start describing nothingness, you end up with somethingness.
Just go outside and look at something and write it down and you'll find it is a very nice piece of writing.
And now, without having wearied my friends, I hope, with detailed scientific accounts, theories, or deductions, I will only say that I have endeavoured to tell just the story of the adventure itself.
I think the film gives you a picture of a person. It gives you a complete picture.
Good storytelling appeals to me - good writing.
For a sorcerer, reality, or the world as we all know it, is only a description.
One describes a tale best by telling the tale. You see? The way one describes a story, to oneself or to the world, is by telling the story. It is a balancing act and it is a dream. The more accurate the map, the more it resembles the territory. The most accurate map possible would be the territory, and thus would be perfectly accurate and perfectly useless. The tale is the map that is the territory. You must remember this.
If you ask me to describe my relationship, I mean - words are too clumsy to accurately describe how I feel in that regard, particularly in an interview. It's a strange thing.
You know more of a road by having traveled it than by all the conjectures and descriptions in the world.
If you want to write about people, you can make it up. But if you spend time talking to someone and examining what it is you want to write about, you discover a level of detail that you wouldn't have noticed otherwise.
Multiple descriptions are better than one.
I love words, and I love that there's so many words available to make a point and to create a picture.
There is nothing as mysterious as a fact clearly described.
To call a posit a posit is not to patronize it. A posit can be unavoidable except at the cost of other no less artificial expedients. Everything to which we concede existence is a posit from the standpoint of a description of the theory-building process, and simultaneously real from the standpoint of the theory that is being built.
