Ignore Everybody - MacLeod, Hugh [17]
“Take a look at this, sunshine,” he said, handing a piece of paper over to me.
I gave it a look. Some long-established cartoonist whose name I recognized had written him a rather sad and desperate letter, begging to be published.
“Another whiny letter from another whiny cartoonist who used to be famous twenty-five years ago,” he said, rolling his eyeballs. “I get at least fifty of them a week from other whiny formerly famous cartoonists.”
He paused. Then he flashed a wicked grin.
“How not to get published,” he said. “Write me a bloody letter like that one.”
29. Power is never given. Power is taken.
People who are “ready” give off a different vibe from people who aren’t. Animals can smell fear. And the lack thereof.
THE MINUTE YOU BECOME READY IS THE MINUTE you stop dreaming. Suddenly it’s no longer about “becoming.” Suddenly it’s about “doing.”
You don’t get the dream job because you walk into the editor’s office for the first time and go, “Hi, I would really love to be a sportswriter one day, please.”
You get the job because you walk into the editor’s office and go, “Hi, I’m the best frickin’ sportswriter on the planet.” And somehow the editor can tell you aren’t lying, either.
You didn’t go in there, asking the editor to give you power. You went in there and politely informed the editor that you already have the power. That’s what being “ready” means. That’s what “taking power” means.
Not needing anything from another person in order to be the best in the world.
30. Whatever choice you make, the Devil gets his due eventually.
Selling out to Hollywood comes with a price. So does not selling out. Either way, you pay in full, and yes, it invariably hurts like hell.
PEOPLE ARE FOND OF SPOUTING OUT THE OLD cliché about how Van Gogh never sold a painting in his lifetime. Somehow his example serves to justify to us, decades later, that there is merit in utter failure.
Perhaps, but the man did commit suicide. The market for his work took off big-time shortly after his death. Had he decided to stick around another few decades he most likely would’ve entered old age quite prosperous. And sadly for failures everywhere, the cliché would have lost a lot of its power.
The fact is, the old clichés work for us in abstract terms, but they never work out in real life quite the same way. Life is messy; clichés are clean and tidy.
Of course, there is no one “true way” to make it as an artist, writer, filmmaker, or whatever it is your dream to be. Whether you follow the example of fame-and-glamour Warhol or poor-and-miserable Van Gogh doesn’t matter in absolute terms.
Either extreme may raise you to the highest heights or utterly destroy you. I don’t know the answer, nor does anybody else. Nobody but you and God know why you were put on this earth, and even then . . .
So when a young person asks me whether it’s better to sell out or stick to one’s guns, I never know what to answer. Warhol sold out shamelessly after 1968 (the year he was wounded by the gunshot of a would-be assassin) and did OK by it. I know some great artists who stuck to their guns, and all it did was make them seem more and more pathetic.
Anyone can be an idealist. Anyone can be a cynic. The hard part lies somewhere in the middle—that is, being human.
31. The hardest part of being creative is getting used to it.
If you have the creative urge, it isn’t going to go away. But sometimes it takes a while before you accept the fact.
BACK IN 1989, I WAS LIVING IN WEST LONDON, house-sitting a family member’s lovely little flat over the summer. In the flat above lived the film director Tim Burton, who was in town for a couple of months while he was filming Batman: The Movie.
We got to know each other on and off quite well that year. We weren’t that close or anything, but we saw each other around a lot. He was a pretty good neighbor, I tried to be the same.
At the time I was in my last year of college, studying to go into advertising as a copywriter. One night he and his wife came over for dinner.
Somewhere along the line