To be censored is one sure way of knowing you have been taken dead seriously. It also speaks to the continuing power of the printed word, almost fifteen hundred years after that amazing invention.
I admit that I am hopelessly hooked on the printed newspaper. I love turning the pages and the serendipity of stumbling across a piece of irresistible information or a photograph that I wasn’t necessarily intending to read.
For 500 years after Gutenberg, the dominant form of information was the printed page: knowledge was primarily delivered in a fixed format, one that encouraged readers to believe in stable and settled truths.
Ideals jump across the hierarchies of the printed word.
In writing biography, fact and fiction shouldn’t be mixed. And if they are, the fictional points should be printed in red ink, the facts printed in black ink.
I did comics on the Internet because it was free, and if I had made printed copies, I wouldn’t have known what to do with them. But I knew how to make a website when most people didn’t, and back then, that was enough!
A critic once described me as an ‘amiable beanpole.’ I got it printed on a T-shirt.
Every author really wants to have letters printed in the papers. Unable to make the grade, he drops down a rung of the ladder and writes novels.
I do not love to be printed on every occasion, much less to be dunned and teased by foreigners about mathematical things or to be thought by our own people to be trifling away my time about them when I should be about the king’s business.
I don’t go looking for the post-match team pictures posted by players on Instagram, but usually, someone ends up showing them to me, or I notice them when they get printed in the newspapers.
The funniest thing is I never understood why actors were so shady about who they’re dating. Then I realized the things you say get printed and the people you’re involved with read them. That’s what’s tricky. Nothing goes unnoticed. I don’t want to get myself in trouble!
Whenever I go to Germany I find that my readers have T-shirts with my book covers printed on them. They come to all the events, they have gifts and they come with their families. They are always very open to sharing their personal stories.
When I wanted a job at Christian Louboutin, I literally printed the entrance of the store I wanted to work at on my wall and looked at it in the morning before I got up and went to work at Children’s Shoes.
Even printed, on pages that are bound, sentences remain unsettled organisms. Years later, I can always reach out to smooth a stray hair. And yet, at a certain point, I must walk away, trusting them to do their work. I am left looking over my shoulder, wondering if I might have structured one more effectively.
When I moved to Los Angeles, aged 54, I printed out Winston Churchill’s phrase, ‘Never, never, never give up’, and stuck it on my fridge. I had no idea what was going to happen, but I knew I had to keep on going.
