Dream Seller Quotes

When you write, you believe in something no one else can see. You spend lots of time committed to a project for which there are no assurances, no guarantees. Being a writer subjects you to the same doubts, the same unpopularity, the same nagging questions that believers struggle with. Writing is communing with the unseen…

Writing a book is exactly like love. You don’t hold back. You give it everything you have. If it doesn’t work out, you’re heartbroken, but you move forward and start again anyway. You have to. You don’t hold some of yourself in reserve. It’s all or nothing. There are no guarantees.

The principles underlying propaganda are extremely simple. Find some common desire, some widespread unconscious fear or anxiety; think out some way to relate this wish or fear to the product you have to sell; then build a bridge of verbal or pictorial symbols over which your customer can pass from fact to compensatory dream, and from the dream to the illusion that your product, when purchased, will make the dream come true. They are selling hope. We no longer buy oranges, we buy vitality. We do not just buy an auto, we buy prestige. And so with all the rest. In toothpaste, for example, we buy not a mere cleanser and antiseptic, but release from the fear of being sexually repulsive. In vodka and whisky we are not buying a protoplasmic poison which in small doses, may depress the nervous system in a psychologically valuable way; we are buying friendliness and good fellowship, the warmth of Dingley Dell and the brilliance of the Mermaid Tavern. With our laxatives we buy the health of a Greek god. With the monthly best seller we acquire culture, the envy of our less literate neighbors and the respect of the sophisticated. In every case the motivation analyst has found some deep-seated wish or fear, whose energy can be used to move the customer to part with cash and so, indirectly, to turn the wheels of industry.

In the City Market is the Meet Café. Followers of obsolete, unthinkable trades doodling in Etruscan, addicts of drugs not yet synthesized, pushers of souped-up harmine, junk reduced to pure habit offering precarious vegetable serenity, liquids to induce Latah, Tithonian longevity serums, black marketeers of World War III, excusers of telepathic sensitivity, osteopaths of the spirit, investigators of infractions denounced by bland paranoid chess players, servers of fragmentary warrants taken down in hebephrenic shorthand charging unspeakable mutilations of the spirit, bureaucrats of spectral departments, officials of unconstituted police states, a Lesbian dwarf who has perfected operation Bang-utot, the lung erection that strangles a sleeping enemy, sellers of orgone tanks and relaxing machines, brokers of exquisite dreams and memories tested on the sensitized cells of junk sickness and bartered for raw materials of the will, doctors skilled in the treatment of diseases dormant in the black dust of ruined cities, gathering virulence in the white blood of eyeless worms feeling slowly to the surface and the human host, maladies of the ocean floor and the stratosphere, maladies of the laboratory and atomic war... A place where the unknown past and the emergent future meet in a vibrating soundless hum... Larval entities waiting for a Live One...

Sometimes your dream is so special that... you can't kill it. You can't die even if you try. Life will find a way to fulfill it, and a way to keep you alive. Because the Earth needs dreamers to survive.

Novels by serious writers of genius often eventually become best-sellers, but most contemporary best-sellers are written by second-class writers whose psychological brew contains a touch of naïvety, a touch of sentimentality, the story-telling gift, and a mysterious sympathy with the day-dreams of ordinary people.

I tell you, life is extraordinary. A few years ago I couldn’t write anything or sell anything, I’d passed the age where you know all the returns are in, I’d had my chance and done my best and failed. And how was I to know the miracle waiting to happen round the corner in late middle age? 84, Charing Cross Road was no best seller, you understand; it didn’t make me rich or famous. It just got me hundreds of letters and phone calls from people I never knew existed; it got me wonderful reviews; it restored a self-confidence and self-esteem I’d lost somewhere along the way, God knows how many years ago. It brought me to England. It changed my life.

Once you are a liar, no one will believe anything about you, even if you show them your broken heart. And a broken heart is the most believable thing in the world.

I divorced her in my imagined future and gave her back to God for safekeeping and offered my own heart to Him for repairs.

عاشق ها میرن ولی عشق ها باقی میمونن رویافروش خاموشی یک رویا

Because what does it mean, to say that things aren't going well? Compared to what? You can say: compared to how things were going a couple of hours ago, or a couple of years ago. But that's not the point. If two cars are speeding towards a brick wall with no brakes, and one car hits the wall moments before the other, you can't spend those moments saying the second car is much better off than the first. Death and disaster are at our shoulders every second of our lives, trying to get at us. Missing, a lot of the time. A lot of miles on the motorway without a front wheel blow-out. A lot of viruses that slither through our bodies without snagging. A lot of pianos that fall a minute after we've passed. Or a month, it makes no difference. So unless we're going to get down on our knees and give thanks every time disaster misses, it makes no sense to moan when it strikes. Us, or anyone else. Because we're not comparing it with anything. And anyway, we're all dead, or never born, and the whole thing really is a dream There, you see. That's a funny side.

Focusing on smaller, progressive parts of the work also eliminates the tendency to sit on your ass and dream indefinitely. There

Being a writer is a gift, being an author is amazing, becoming a best seller is everyone's dream

The lesson is that prayer is not for the moon to stop for us. It is for us to stop and the consider the work of heaven.

To everyone we love we give a knife. The knife is shaped to pass through the bones of our chests like a key in a lock. Nothing else can cut our hearts so deeply.

I dreamed of moons that night. Twin screens of themselves: one dark twin, one light.

But wouldn't it be nice if love was all around us, like life and death? Wouldn't it be nice if love was inevitable like the other two? That you could be sure you'd find someone to love and love you in return?

Wouldn't it be nice if love was always around us like life and death? Wouldn't it be nice if love was inevitable like the other two? That you could be sure you'd find someone to love and love you in return? Or a mother, or a brother, or a good friend? Wouldn't these be the promises that made life worth while?

She saw herself, a fading figure, more than half-way now towards the sunset end, within sight even of the shadowed emptiness that lay beyond the sun's dipping edge. She had lingered over-long, expecting a dream to confirm a dream; she had been oblivious of the truth that the lane went rushing just the same. It was now too late. The speed increased. She had waited, waited for nothing. The seller of dreams was a myth.

I'm in the market for some present tense; I'm on the lookout, shopping around, more so every year. It's a seller's market—do you think I won't sell all that I have to buy it? Thomas Merton wrote, in a light passage in one of his Gethsemane journals: "Suggested emendation in the Lord's Prayer: Take out 'Thy Kingdom come' and substitute 'Give us time!'" But time is the only thing we have been given, and we have been given to time. Time gives us a whirl. We keep waking from a dream we can't recall, looking around in surprise, and lapsing back, for years on end. All I want to do is stay awake, keep my head up, prop my eyes open, with toothpicks, with trees.

From the White House on down, the myth holds that fatherhood is the great antidote to all that ails black people. But Billy Brooks Jr. had a father. Trayvon Martin had a father. Jordan Davis had a father. Adhering to middle-class norms has never shielded black people from plunder. Adhering to middle-class norms is what made Ethel Weatherspoon a lucrative target for rapacious speculators. Contract sellers did not target the very poor. They targeted black people who had worked hard enough to save a down payment and dreamed of the emblem of American citizenship-homeownership. It was not a tangle of pathology that put a target on Clyde Ross' back. It was not a culture of poverty that singled out Mattie Lewis for "the thrill of the chase and the kill." Some black people always will be twice as good. But they generally find white predation to be thrice as fast.

. . .You are preparing to make it possible to live in the writer’s dream, by learning to market your writing skills, your wonderful books. All it takes is believing in yourself for an instant, believing your power as a storyteller full, completely, absolutely without question. AND, letting go just long enough to create, to break the dam that’s holding you back. Just a little rupture so your energy starts leaking out, and you start learning to quit dwelling on any the thoughts related to your mental roadblocks. . . .

Moore’s language fuels such enthusiastic approval in Europe because—on the one hand—it now seems legitimate, even laudable and progressive, to express prejudices and derogatory views concerning Americans publicly in a way that one may no longer do precisely because advances in the discourse and demeanor of tolerance over the past forty years have made the expressions of similar derogatory sentiments regarding other nationalities unacceptable;12 and because—on the other hand—these negative tropes are magnified and fortified by several degrees by Moore’s being so quintessentially American. With the exception of the British yellow press and the stands of European soccer stadiums, public expressions of humiliation like these are no longer acceptable in today’s Europe. In this context, a German friend quite correctly told me the following: “It would be unthinkable for books like Stupid White Men to hold leading positions for months at the top of Germany’s best-seller list if these stupid white men were anybody but Americans, say if they were Italians, Frenchmen, or Brits, let alone Germans. No German author would ever dream of publishing an equivalent book on Germans, and if he or she did, the book would surely not catapult to the top of the charts as it has in Moore’s case.

...and as I walked, I tried to see the funny side. It wasn’t easy, and I’m still not sure that I managed it properly, but it’s just something I like to do when things aren’t going well. Because what does it mean, to say that things aren’t going well? Compared to what? You can say: compared to how things were going a couple of hours ago, or a couple of years ago. But that’s not the point. If two cars are speeding towards a brick wall with no brakes, and one car hits the wall moments before the other, you can’t spend those moments saying that the second car is much better off than the first. Death and disaster are at our shoulders every second of our lives, trying to get at us. Missing, a lot of the time. A lot of miles on the motorway without a front wheel blow-out. A lot of viruses that slither through our bodies without snagging. A lot of pianos that fall a minute after we’ve passed. Or a month, it makes no difference. So unless we’re going to get down on our knees and give thanks every time disaster misses, it makes no sense to moan when it strikes. Us, or anyone else. Because we’re not comparing it with anything. And anyway, we’re all dead, or never born, and the whole thing really is a dream. There, you see. That’s a funny side.

For with each bite he tasted not just the irresistible sweetness of the dessert, but the deliciously agonizing negative flavor of all the imagined foodstuffs that he could have bought with that nickel instead—a turkey leg the size of his forearm, or a milkshake with a pair of deep red strawberries floating on its surface. The single relinquished nickel sat in the custard seller's till, its gold transmuted back to lead.

He had betrayed God and wanted to hide from him, the way children hide, sitting in the open and covering their eyes.

Well, about this story, regarding which Aunt Elizabeth had such an Oliver Twist complex. Suppose she were to write another one—suddenly the idea came. Suppose she were to expand it into a book. Not like A Seller of Dreams, of course. That old glory could come back no more. But Emily had an instantaneous vision of the new book, as a whole—a witty, sparkling rill of human comedy. She ran down to Aunt Elizabeth.

But the old king hadn’t said anything about being robbed, or about endless deserts, or about people who know what their dreams are but don’t want to realize them. The old king hadn’t told him that the Pyramids were just a pile of stones, or that anyone could build one in his backyard. And he had forgotten to mention that, when you have enough money to buy a flock larger than the one you had before, you should buy it. The boy picked up his pouch and put it with his other things. He went down the stairs and found the merchant waiting on a foreign couple, while two other customers walked about the shop, drinking tea from crystal glasses. It was more activity than usual for this time of the morning. From where he stood, he saw for the first time that the old merchant’s hair was very much like the hair of the old king. He remembered the smile of the candy seller, on his first day in Tangier, when he had nothing to eat and nowhere to go—that smile had also been like the old king’s smile.

I figured the thing came when there were enough shadows to the day to collect around itself like a dim dream of a cape. It was always hiding a little—flirting with the possibility of showing itself, but ultimately deciding against it.

know, when James was born, I knew in here that

An old farmer said he quit tobacco for good one day when he discovered he had left his tobacco home and started to walk the two miles for it. On the way, he “saw” that he was being “used” in a humiliating way by a habit. He got mad, turned around, went back to the field, and never smoked again. Clarence Darrow, the famous attorney, said his success started the day that he “got mad” when he attempted to secure a mortgage to buy a house. Just as the transaction was about to be completed, the lender’s wife spoke up and said, “Don’t be a fool. He will never make enough money to pay it off.” Darrow himself had had serious doubts about the same thing. But something happened when he heard her remark. He became indignant, both at the woman and at himself, and determined he would be a success. A businessman friend of mine had a very similar experience. A failure at 40, he continually worried about “how things would come out,” about his own inadequacies, and whether or not he would be able to complete each business venture. Fearful and anxious, he was attempting to purchase some machinery on credit, when the seller’s wife objected. She did not believe he would ever be able to pay for the machinery. At first his hopes were dashed. But then he became indignant. Who was he to be pushed around like that? Who was he to skulk through the world, continually fearful of failure? The experience awakened “something” within him—some “new self”—and at once he saw that this woman’s remark, as well as his own opinion of himself, was an affront to this “something.” He had no money, no credit, and no way to accomplish what he wanted. But he found a way—and within three years he was more successful than he had ever dreamed of being—not in one business, but in three.

From the White House on down, the myth holds that fatherhood is the great antidote to all that ails black people. But Billy Brooks Jr. had a father. Trayvon Martin had a father. Jordan Davis had a father. Adhering to middle-class norms has never shielded black people from plunder. Adhering to middle-class norms is what made Ethel Weatherspoon a lucrative target for rapacious speculators. Contract sellers did not target the very poor. They targeted black people who had worked hard enough to save a down payment and dreamed of the emblem of American citizenship—homeownership. It was not a tangle of pathology that put a target on Clyde Ross’s back. It was not a culture of poverty that singled out Mattie Lewis for “the thrill of the chase and the kill.” Some black people always will be twice as good. But they generally find white predation to be thrice as fast.

Writing is a physical art. And writing a book is a lot more like making a complex sculpture out of bronze than writing a whole bunch of reports. What's in your head does not count, not for sculpture, not for book writing. Pencil on paper is what matters. Words on paper, pages and pages, chapter after chapter.

The Diet Revolution was not just advocating a way to lose weight, which Atkins credited, in any case, to Banting, Pennington, Kekwick, and Pawan, but overthrowing the current nutritional wisdom entirely. Unlike Irwin Stillman, whose 1967 mega–best-seller The Doctor’s Quick Weight Loss Diet was also based on carbohydrate restriction, Atkins wanted “a revolution, not just a diet.” “Martin Luther King had a dream,” Atkins wrote. “I, too, have one. I dream of a world where no one has to diet. A world where the fattening refined carbohydrates have been excluded from the diet.

Court was adjourned. As I was led to the police car, I briefly recognized the scent and colour of a summer’s evening. From the darkness of my moving prison, I rediscovered, one by one – as if arising from the depths of my weariness – all the familiar sounds of the city that I loved, and that particular moment of the day when I had sometimes felt happy. The shouts of the newspaper sellers in the calm night air, the last few birds in the town square, the people selling sandwiches, the creaking of the trams along the high bends of the city and the slight breeze from above before night suddenly falls over the port – to me, all these things merged to form the journey of a blind man, a journey I’d known so well before going to prison. Yes, this was the time of day when, a very long time ago, I had felt happy. A time when I could look forward to a night of peaceful sleep, devoid of dreams. But now, all that had changed; as I waited for the new day to dawn, I found myself back in my cell. It was as if the familiar paths etched in the summer skies could just as easily lead to prison as to innocent sleep.