Paul Eckert > Paul's Quotes

“I’ll keep this part short, because no one truly gives a shit about this kind of stuff, and I’m sure you don’t, either. They want to read about someone with more tragic failings than themselves surviving hell to get the girl in the very end. Anything to make their dull existences tolerable, their literary doses coming four minutes at a time on the crapper one-point-seven times per day. By my calculations, that puts you about one week into this story, far too removed emotionally to possibly understand my actions.”
― Gordon Highland, Major Inversions

“You remind Cruise that I was the one who begged him to run screaming from that script,” Graham shouts into a speakerphone on his desk in an office just like every office in movies with studio executive scenes. Where a window fills the entire rear wall on a floor so high you could see your house from it if it weren’t obscured by its own weather system. The kind that silhouettes the man in power with a Christ-like halo of sunlight meant to intimidate guests into squinting in what could be mistaken for awe. He waves me inside to sit in a chair that’s at least one strategic foot lower than his own.”
― Gordon Highland, Major Inversions

“These things matter. It’s tedious, I know. Any writer worth his weight in pulp would by now have set the hero along a definable journey, or at least created some kind of goal against which to measure his progress as we move forward. I assure you, the foundation has been laid. Characters have been established and the scene is set. Dim the lights and let’s dance. Who says I’m even the hero? Get off my fucking back. I’m no journalist, I’m a musician, for Christ’s sake! Still, the ultimate truth, for our purposes anyway, whether these events are factual or not, is better revealed through the words I choose to describe them. I’d never cheat you of that. I only wish I could see through the back of the page as you make the connections.”
― Gordon Highland, Major Inversions

“Strapped in, this chair conjures sympathetic imagery the eyes could never record. Theater of the mind etched on the skull wall. The collective depression of the universe weighting our thoughts, the search for truths, the need to feel connections with others. Bliss balancing confusion, fear tempered by hope.”
― gordon highland

“Hold the mail, I could swear that was funny. He must draw his powers from the others. A malevolent synergy, like when you multiply negative numbers.”
― Gordon Highland, Major Inversions

“Many people talk of the “god-shaped void” in their lives that had been waiting to be filled by faith. Always in born-again hindsight, this is. Of course, in present tense, the void is usually first tested with drug- and carnality-shaped pieces until the person’s jigsawed chi bottoms out and settles for spirituality in the bonus round.”
― Gordon Highland, Major Inversions

“My role is insignificant. Sure, there’s diaper detail and fire watch and general fawning, but aside from keeping our noses above the poverty line, I’m as useful to the kid as a philosophy degree.”
― Gordon Highland, Major Inversions

“I think that writers are made, not born or created out of dreams of childhood trauma—that becoming a writer (or a painter, actor, director, dancer, and so on) is a direct result of conscious will. Of course there has to be some talent involved, but talent is a dreadfully cheap commodity, cheaper than table salt. What separates the talented individual from the successful one is a lot of hard work and study; a constant process of honing. Talent is a dull knife that will cut nothing unless it is wielded with great force—a force so great the knife is not really cutting at all but bludgeoning and breaking (and after two or three of these gargantuan swipes it may succeed in breaking itself…which may be what happened to such disparate writers as Ross Lockridge and Robert E. Howard). Discipline and constant work are the whetstones upon which the dull knife of talent is honed until it becomes sharp enough, hopefully, to cut through even the toughest meat and gristle. No writer, painter, or actor—no artist—is ever handed a sharp knife (although a few are handed almighty big ones; the name we give to the artist with the big knife is “genius”), and we hone with varying degrees of zeal and aptitude.”
― Stephen King, Danse Macabre