One of my great regrets, and I don’t have many, is that I spent too long putting people’s status and reputation ahead of their more important qualities. I learned far too late in life that a long list of letters after someone’s name is no guarantee of compassion, kindness, humour, all the far more relevant stuff.
When I first went to Japan, I was wrestling under my real name. The Japanese people have a great amount of difficulty with the letters f, r and l. So three out of the six letters in my first name they couldn’t say. It was a bit of a mouthful for those guys.
I receive the flak via nasty blog posts, letters, usually coming from very religious people who cannot reconcile how I could share spiritual message and at the same time teach about money.
I don’t get distracted until the weight of other things left undone finally tips the balance; my mind is flooded with calls, bills, supermarkets, letters, and I have to stop and sort things out.
Over the years, it seems ‘Firefly’ has only gained momentum rather than lost it. I still get letters from people who watched the show – I get more ‘Firefly’ than ‘Mad Men’ letters.
If you want to act, you have to devote yourself to it. Send out letters and photos every day, work all the hours under the sun, whatever it takes. If you’re not determined, you won’t get anywhere.
I get a lot of letters that say, ‘I’m a normal, down-to-earth girl. I love to cook, and I love sports.’ What I also get are letters from a whole bunch of moms saying, ‘My daughter is awesome,’ and, ‘My daughter is a great daughter.’
The mail amazes me. I sometimes get these letters that are ten pages, and handwritten, from women pouring their hearts out and, for security reasons, I can only respond with a headshot and ‘Dear so and so, be good. WM.’ It never feels like enough.
Alongside my ‘no email’ policy, I resolve to make better use of the wonderful Royal Mail, and send letters and postcards to people. There is a huge pleasure in writing a letter, putting it in an envelope and sticking the stamp on it. And huge pleasure in receiving real letters, too.
Usually, historical revelations come from days of legwork, ploughing through piles of letters and papers in archives or even private homes, looking for the telling phrase or letter that someone else has missed.
The absolute base-level thing that you do as a new screenwriter is send out query letters. Literally, you just say, ‘Hi, Mr. So-and-So,’ and you give them a one-sentence description of one of your scripts. You send it out to a list of people you found on the Internet.
In high school, my dream was to go to the NBA. But when recruiting came around, the letters for football compared to basketball were like 25 to one, and my one wasn’t from Duke.
I love Miranda Lambert; I think she’s wonderful. I love the song ‘Love Letters’ and ‘Famous in a Small Town.’
Always write angry letters to your enemies. Never mail them.
I’m sure I would have been considered a more significant artist if I was a singer-songwriter. It’s just not the way I roll. I love being a curator and a musicologist. People write me letters and thank me for turning them on to Fred McDowell and Sippie Wallace, and that’s partly my job this time around.
A novel means a new way of doing a story. If you go back the origins of a novel, ‘Clarissa’ – that’s not a novel; it’s just a bunch of letters. But it isn’t! Because it’s organised in a particular way! A novel is what you make of it.
Before my husband deploys, he has a ritual that is familiar to many service members. He sits down with a generously poured bourbon, and he writes letters. One for his adult daughter, Rosalind. One for each of our little boys, Teddy and Antonio. One for his grandma, who raised him, and his family in Texas. One for me.
The most dazzling aspect of ‘Possession’ is Ms. Byatt’s canny invention of letters, poems and diaries from the 19th century.
Donald Trump is an archetypal grifter. Using the presidency to promote your golf courses, hotels, and real estate business is grifting. So is getting people to pay a premium for buildings with your name in big, gold letters. Licensing your name is what every grifter dreams about.
A typical agent in New York gets 400 query letters a month. Of those, they might ask to read 3-4 manuscripts, and of those, they might ask to represent 1.
As a teenager I wrote to R.A. Lafferty. And he responded, too, with letters that were like R.A. Lafferty short stories, filled with elliptical answers to straight questions and simple answers to complicated ones.
All of our lyrics are really personal, and we get a lot of personal letters.
I get a lot of letters from French lady admirers – and gentlemen. ‘Midsomer’ is a huge hit in France, and it’s all down to the guy dubbing me into French – a middle-aged balding fellow.
The position of modern science, as far as an ignorant man of letters can understand it, seems not a step in advance of that held by Huxley and Romanes in the last century.
Feedback is a pleasant thing. I get a lot of letters from unexpected people in unexpected places.
I have written a lot of love letters to the people that I love in my life. It’s sweet to be able to keep that, like a tangible letter, and I want to give that to people.
Quite honestly, if we do manage to destroy the planet with our devil-may-care attitude to natural resources, I’d suggest we leave, as a dossier in our defence, the collected letters to agony aunts and uncles down the generations. It would certainly prove that we weren’t all bad!
I get letters from women, and they say, ‘I love your Roman nose.’ If I weren’t on TV and I walked past that same woman, she’d go, ‘Did you see the beak on that guy?
I’d like to feel that an advertiser gets something extra when they advertise with us – a certain humanity that comes from upbeat and positive human interest letters and success stories.
Letters are something from you. It’s a different kind of intention than writing an e-mail.
I’ve thought of publishing a book of my hate mail, but I don’t own the rights to the letters.
My spelling is Wobbly. It’s good spelling but it Wobbles, and the letters get in the wrong places.
The little words in the Republic of Letters, like the little folks in a nation, are the most useful and significant.
For designers, the rigidity of an alphabet presents a never-ending artistic challenge: How do you do something new and still preserve the letters’ essential forms?
I have 800 books of just Samuel Beckett’s work, tons of his correspondence, personal letters that he wrote. I have copies of plays he used when he directed, so all of his handwritten notes are in the corners of the page.
It’s still incredibly hard. Not just honing my craft but kicking down doors, getting my work published. Early on, I could have wallpapered my house with all the rejection letters sent my way. I put thousands of hours and pages into four novels that never saw the light of day.
I destroyed all my geek stuff because I didn’t want to be a geek, and I regret it to this day. Consumed in the geek bonfire of the vanities was a collection of autographs and letters from Peter Cushing, Spike Milligan and Frankie Howerd, the first Doctor Whos, actual astronauts, and many more.
Mail is processed. It arrives at Paramount Studios! It’s sorted, and a pile is brought to the production offices for each of the TV shows shot there. That mail is sorted so that each actor gets his letters. A pile is placed in his dressing room.
Times have changed since 2002 when I won a spot in the group ‘Popstars.’ Back in the day we would get fan letters in the mail, now you can find anyone and contact people. It’s incredible how fans can have a personal connection, share photos, stories.
The letters were universally complimentary, and we designers loved hearing that our games were being enjoyed, but if they weren’t sending us a picture of their screens most of those writers would have spent their time playing the game rather than writing letters.
A lot of women wrote to me. Some wrote me long letters on the meaning of the circle and about mythology and about motherhood and the significance or the symbolism of the mermaid and the frogs and the turtles.
I used to always make art for girls. That was the thing I did for girls to like me. I did portraits, drawings, letters that formed outlines of significant things in our relationship. Art. I just used art in general. It usually worked.
When I was a kid in Houston, we were so poor we couldn’t afford the last 2 letters, so we called ourselves po’.
I wish there was something that – I get all those wonderful letters and wonderful acknowledgments, and I wish I could be more appreciative of what I do. But it’s hard for me.
If you ever watched ‘Hercules,’ you can see that it was made in a comical way for the most part. I remember getting lots of letters from kids around the world saying that the show helped them curb their temper and not look for trouble and just walk away from it because that was the stronger thing to do.
Letter writing was clearly important to Reagan. Even as president he kept dashing off letters to friends, pen pals, media people, statesmen, critics, and the kind of people who write to presidents never expecting a reply.
Just like Lara Jean in my book ‘To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before,’ I used to write letters to boys I was in love with – letters full of emotion and longing and also recrimination – but they were for my eyes only.
