Because there’s nothing as perfect as the initial idea. And the only reason I write and direct is to protect the writing, because that’s what’s most precious…

You can be as good as anyone that ever lived. If you can read, you can learn everything that anyone ever learned. But you’ve got to want it.

Read more: http://www.esquire.com/features/man-at-his-best/q-and-a/ricky-gervais-interview-0212-2#ixzz1kyRHVsfZ

- Ricky Gervais, Esquire Magazine

- Research strongly suggests that people are more creative when they enjoy privacy and freedom from interruption. And the most spectacularly creative people in many fields are often introverted…

- Conversely, brainstorming sessions are one of the worst possible ways to stimulate creativity…The reasons brainstorming fails are instructive for other forms of group work, too. People in groups tend to sit back and let others do the work; they instinctively mimic others’ opinions and lose sight of their own; and, often succumb to peer pressure.

- If you have talented and motivated people, they should be encouraged to work alone when creativity or efficiency is the highest priority.

Amen.

The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day.

- David Foster Wallace, Kenyon College commencement address

The interesting thing with Facebook is that, with 500 to 800 million of us connected around the world, it sort of devalues information and devalues knowledge. And this isn’t the comment of some reactionary who doesn’t like Facebook, but it’s rather the comment of someone who realizes that knowledge and new ideas are extraordinarily hard to come by. And as we’re more and more connected to each other, there’s more and more to copy. We realize the value in copying, and so that’s what we do.

And we seek out that information in cheaper and cheaper ways. We go up on Google, we go up on Facebook, see who’s doing what to whom. We go up on Google and find out the answers to things. And what that’s telling us is that knowledge and new ideas are cheap. And it’s playing into a set of predispositions that we have been selected to have anyway, to be copiers and to be followers. But at no time in history has it been easier to do that than now. And Facebook is encouraging that.

- Mark Pagel, Infinite Stupidity

I still don’t know whether or not to like an interesting article on a fascinating topic, my intended amour for the sentiment rather than the event. I’m not certain how my sarcasm is being met, nor if my lack of comment on the passing of a celebrity signals contempt for the deceased. I have friends I haven’t sent a birthday cake icon to. I keep meaning to follow others back. There is better that I could doing.

- Nathaniel Missildine, Picture Me Not Posting

What is Skillshare? from Skillshare on Vimeo.

And yet pain hurts but it doesn’t kill. When you consider the alternative — an anesthetized dream of self-sufficiency, abetted by technology — pain emerges as the natural product and natural indicator of being alive in a resistant world. To go through a life painlessly is to have not lived. Even just to say to yourself, “Oh, I’ll get to that love and pain stuff later, maybe in my 30s” is to consign yourself to 10 years of merely taking up space on the planet and burning up its resources. Of being (and I mean this in the most damning sense of the word) a consumer.

- Jonathan Franzen, Liking is for Cowards

Handmade Portraits: Liberty Vintage Motorcycles from Etsy on Vimeo.

and (my dream is to some day be published in McSweeneys)

David Foster Wallace, Shipping Out (PDF).