My father was an engineer – he wasn’t literary, not a writer or a journalist, but he was one of the world’s great readers. Every two weeks, he’d take me to our local branch library and pull books off the shelf for me, stacking them up in my arms – ‘Have you read this? And this? And this?’
There’s something about pulling out a real tape from a shelf and looking at it and knowing that ‘Everlong’ is on it, or ‘Best of You’ is on it, and it’s really special.
Online games for data-mining have a short virtual shelf life. People get bored, especially if the game seems stagnant.
A novel, of course, is a fully self-contained work of art. You pick it up off the shelf, open it, and there it is – a whole universe waiting for you to enter. A screenplay is just a blueprint for making a movie. Until the movie is actually filmed, the script really means nothing.
One thing that I had to remember in my personal journey in the music industry and coming up in the music industry was how many times I was told no. I was signed, I was dropped, I was signed, and I was put on a shelf.
I used to collect knick-knacks, like wizards, trolls and little buddhas, and arrange them like precious things on a shelf.
Comedians are innately programmed to pick up oddities like mispronounced words, upside-down books on a shelf, and generally undetectable mistakes in everyday life.
The shelf life of the average trade book is somewhere between milk and yogurt.
Character actors have a long shelf life.
