An attitude is: an inward feeling expressed by an outward action.
When you write in the third person, you get to imagine other people's interiority.
I can look back and recognize the things I've done and said that were wrong: unethical, gratuitously hurtful, golden-rule-breaking, et cetera. Sometimes the wrongness was even clear at the time, though not as clear as it is now. But I did these things because I felt the pull of a trajectory, a sense of experience piling up the way it does as you turn the pages of a novel. I would be lying if I said I was a different person now. I am the same person. I would do it all again.
If a woman writes about herself, she’s a narcissist. If a man does the same, he’s describing the human condition. But people seem to evaluate your work based on how much they relate to it, so it’s like, well, who’s the narcissist?
Elisa Albert in a nutshell: funny, self-aware, and genuinely fearless that she might be a lunatic, or a genius, or both.
No one ever addresses the possibility that a writer might not like her book.
A lot of people get to the point in their careers where blurbs are ghostwritten for them, because they're like, "I want to support this person, it's good for my career," and so they get someone at the publishing house to do it, or they copy something from the press release. People write their own blurbs, absolutely, some huge percentage of the time.
Diplomacy is much like the "lovemaking of elephants", which is accompanied with a lot of bellowing and other sound effects, but no one can be sure of the consequences for at least the next two years
The most insupportable of tyrannies is that of inferiors.
Normally, the same strange impulse which brings a crowd to an accident is present in the reaction to a concert in which something goes wrong.
The Harmonica is the world’s best-selling musical instrument. You’re welcome.