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“Writing is a form of personal freedom. It frees us from the mass identity we see in the making all around us. In the end, writers will write not to be outlaw heroes of some underculture but mainly to save themselves, to survive as individuals.”

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source: Conversations with Don DeLillo (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2005), p.143.

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medium: letter

notes: This comes from a letter Don DeLillo wrote to Jonathan Franzen

“Pink is the navy blue of India.”

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source: D. V. (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 1997), paperback edition, 106.

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medium: autobiography

“It amazes me that most people spend more time planning next summer’s vacation than they do planning the rest of their lives.”

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source: Get What You Want! (Executive Books, 1998).

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medium: self-help

“I don’t consider myself a hero. I’m an ordinary girl who believed in her dream. You don’t have to be someone special or anything special to achieve something amazing. You’ve just got to have a dream, believe in it, and work hard.”

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source: CNN, May 15, 2010

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medium: television news

“If you want to make the right decision for the future, fear is not a very good consultant.”

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source: “Publish or Perish,” by Ken Auletta, in The New Yorker, April 26, 2010.

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medium: magazine article

“Schopenhauer: the task of philosophy is to turn tears into knowledge. And for me, a sigh into a tweet.”

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source: Twitter, 11:57 AM Apr 14, 2010 via web

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medium: social media

“When it finally briefly happens, happiness can feel very worrying.”

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source: Twitter, 11:59 PM Apr 14, 2010 via mobile web

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medium: social media

“Most great problems have no solutions, beyond the relief to be had in sharing and analysing them.”

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source: Twitter, 12:27 AM Apr 15, 2010 via mobile web

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medium: social media

“What grief we’d avoid if we knew how to transfer emotional experience across generations, as we do money or scientific knowledge.”

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source: Twitter, 2:09 AM Apr 9, 2010 mobile web

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medium: social media

“It takes a particular lack of imagination to feel no discomfort in the presence of a cleaner.”

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source: Twitter, 11:03 AM Apr 9, 2010 via web

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medium: social media

“There are meetings which, when cancelled at the last minute, give one an ecstatic feeling of having cheated death for a little longer.”

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source: Twitter, 8:08 AM Apr 21, 2010 via web

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medium: social media

“I have been in a slow process of selling and giving away everything I own…It started a couple of years ago. It was in response to going to these Golden Globe type events and they just give you stuff. You don’t want it. You don’t use it. And then Mad Men started to become a success on a popular level and people started sending me stuff, just boxes of shit. Gifts for every holiday, clothes. One day, I looked around and thought ‘I don’t want this stuff, I didn’t ask for it.’ So I started giving it to friends or charity stores, or if it is still in its box I might sell it for a hundred bucks. I liked it so I didn’t stop.”

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source: “The Observer,” by Tim Adams, in The Guardian, Sunday, April 25, 2010.

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medium: newspaper profile

notes: Vincent Kartheiser plays Pete Campbell in the television series Mad Men

“Every child understands a promise—if it is kept—and looks forward to the next promise.”

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source: The Cider House Rules (New York: William Morrow & Company, 1985), 26.

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medium: fiction

“I cried for the boyfriends I was no longer with, the people and places I no longer knew very well, for my parents and grandparents ailing and stuck in Florida, their tough, unchanging forms conjured only in memory: a jewel box kept in a medicine cabinet in the attic of a house on the moon; that’s where their unchanging forms were kept. I cried for everyone and for all the scrabbly, funny love one sent out into the world like some hit song that enters space and bounds off to another galaxy, a tune so pretty you think the words are true, you do! There was never any containing a song like that, keeping it. It went off and out, speeding out of earshot or imagining or any reach at all, like a rocket invented in sleep.”

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source: Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994), 143.

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medium: fiction

“I put my faith in therapy as others do in religion, or philosophy.”

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source: The Diary of Anaïs Nin (Vol 7, 1966–1974) (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980), 175.

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medium: letter

notes: Nin wrote these words in a letter to a reader in winter 1970–1971

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