Consciously and unconsciously, an artist engaged in serious work is always raising or dealing with the question, 'What really matters?'
No agent wants to see a book until he or she has decided whether to pursue the relationship
Hard to remember who is more dangerous: the people who are attacking our liberties overseas, or those who are suppressing them at home.
The best source for finding an agent is called Literary Agents of North America. It's a complete list of agents, not only by name and address, but by type of book they represent and by what their submission criteria are.
Heart surgeons do not have the world's smallest egos: when you ask them to name the world's three leading practitioners, they never can remember the names of the other two.
And the fury in my community was just staggering. The young priests in the parish were behind the message. The older priests weren't necessarily, but they all followed the orders of the cardinal and read the letter. Every Sunday, 2,000 people came to mass at that parish. The following Sunday, the attendance dropped to 200, and never recovered.
The decimation of Lebanon was showing up in Chicago as a series of restaurants and little shops, just as the destruction of Vietnam had been visible here a decade earlier. If you never read the news but ate out a lot you should be able to tell who was getting beaten up around the world.
It was quite nice to get an opportunity to introduce on the second album something a bit fresh for us. For the rest of the world, perhaps it's not, because guitar is quite ubiquitous, but for us it's exciting to just have guitar on the record.
He [Samuel Beckett] is great, a very great writer. Any modern writer is bound to be influenced by [James] Joyce. Of course, by Beckett as well.
When I hear Christians say, "I don't do this, and I don't do that, and I am following a set of rules," I immediately recognize that they know very little about the grace of God. They are trying to live the Christian life in their own strength. But Paul says, "Be strong in the grace that is in Christ Jesus. "
The true competitors, though, are the ones who always play to win.