Marc Andreessen, speaking at the Milken Institute Global Conference on Monday.
It was the same talk in which Peter Thiel predicted that Twitter would out-live the New York Times — which obviously had a lot of folks in the media industry up-in-arms. I’m sure the Times will continue to exist in some form for a long time, I just wonder how long it will be until they stop printing the actual paper. I bet it’s a lot sooner than a lot of people imagine.
Ernest Hemingway, Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech 1954
(via stoweboyd)
(via meganq)
André Aciman for NYT:
Words radiate something that is more luminous, more credible and more durable than real facts, because under their stewardship, it is not truth we’re after; what we want instead is something that was always there but that we weren’t seeing and are only now, with the genius of retrospection, finally seeing as it should have occurred and might as well have occurred and, better yet, is still likely to occur. In writing, the difference between the no more and the not yet is totally negligible.
A fascinating way to think about writing.
Roy Peter Clark for Poynter:
According to traditional standards of newspaper writing, this lead should be a disaster. It is 79 words long, most of them in that first rambling sentence. It begins not with the news but with a subordinate clause. There are no concrete nouns. No strong active verbs. Why, then, do I think it works so well?
In a word, it has voice.
…
Any experienced writer can master the short snappy sentence. It takes a good writer to master the long sentence, the one that takes the reader on a journey of discovery, the one that leads you to a special place you could not have imagined when you stepped on board the bus.
This is exactly why I loved reading Ebert. And, truth be told, it’s the same style of writing that I’ve tried to put forth. Any success that I’ve had as a writer, I’d attribute directly to that notion: voice. Of course, I’m nowhere near Ebert’s level of expertise — give me 40 years.
