Cristina Acosta
Artist, author, color consultant and Latina artist.
Archive for the ‘Writer’ Category
The criminal is the creative artist; the detective only the critic.
April 15, 2010G. K. Chesterton
Painting by Drew Hewitt: http://drewhewitt.co.uk/
Gilbert Keith Chesterton (29 May 1874 – 14 June 1936) was an English writer. His prolific and diverse output included philosophy, ontology, poetry, play writing, journalism, public lecturing and debating, biography, Christian apologetics, fantasy and detective fiction.
Chesterton has been called the “prince of paradox”. Time magazine, in a review of a biography of Chesterton, observed of his writing style: “Whenever possible Chesterton made his points with popular sayings, proverbs, allegories—first carefully turning them inside out.” For example, Chesterton wrote the following:
Thieves respect property. They merely wish the property to become their property that they may more perfectly respect it.
Chesterton is well known for his reasoned apologetics and even some of those who disagree with him have recognized the universal appeal of such works as Orthodoxy and The Everlasting Man. Chesterton, as a political thinker, cast aspersions on both liberalism and conservatism, saying:
The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of the Conservatives is to prevent the mistakes from being corrected.
Chesterton routinely referred to himself as an “orthodox” Christian, and came to identify such a position with Catholicism more and more, eventually converting to Roman Catholicism from Anglicanism. George Bernard Shaw, Chesterton’s “friendly enemy” according to Time, said of him, “He was a man of colossal genius”.
In order to succeed we must first believe that we can.
April 14, 2010Michael Korda
Michael Korda (born October 8, 1933, London, England, United Kingdom) is a novelist who was editor-in-Chief of Simon & Schuster in New York City.
He is the son of English actress Gertrude Musgrove and artist and film production designer Vincent Korda and the nephew of Hungarian-born film magnate Sir Alexander Korda and brother Zoltan. Michael Korda grew up in England but received part of his education in France where his father had worked with film director Marcel Pagnol. He was schooled at the private Institut Le Rosey in Switzerland and then studied at Oxford University. He served in the Royal Air Force.
While in his early twenties, he moved to New York City where he was employed by playwright Sidney Kingsley as a research assistant. In 1958 he joined the book publishing firm, Simon & Schuster, starting as an assistant editor, which included the task of reading “slush pile” manuscripts. He became Editor-in-Chief of the company and was a major figure in the book industry, publishing numerous works by high-profile writers and personalities such as William L. Shirer, Will and Ariel Durant, Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. However, from a commercial point of view, Korda is best noted for pioneering best-selling novels by authors such as Jacqueline Susann and Harold Robbins that in the 1960s were considered very daring.
Michael Korda was a major part of Simon & Schuster for more than forty years and one of the most influential people in the business of book publishing. In the autumn of 1994, he was diagnosed as having prostate cancer. In 1997 he wrote Man to Man, which recounted his medical experience. In 2000, he published Another Life: A Memoir of Other People, about the world of publishing.
Among Korda’s better-known books are Charmed Lives, which was a memoir about his life with his father and uncle, and the novel Queenie, which is a roman a clef about his aunt Merle Oberon. The latter was adapted into a TV miniseries.
Michael Korda is the father of Chris Korda, the leader of the controversial Church of Euthanasia.
Peace doesn’t require two people; it requires only one. It has to be you. The problem begins and ends there.
April 7, 2010Byron Katie
Byron Katie, founder of The Work, has one job: to teach people how to end their own suffering. As she guides people through the powerful process of inquiry called The Work, they find that their stressful beliefs—about life, other people, or themselves— radically shift and their lives are changed forever.
Based on Byron Katie’s direct experience of how suffering is created and ended, The Work is an astonishingly simple process, accessible to people of all ages and backgrounds, and requires nothing more than a pen and paper and an open mind.
Through this process, anyone can learn to trace unhappiness to its source and eliminate it there. Katie (as everyone calls her) not only shows us that all the problems in the world originate in our thinking: she gives us the tool to open our minds and set ourselves free.
It doesn’t matter what other people think of you. What matters is what you think of yourself.
April 6, 2010Quentin Crisp
Born 25 December 1908(1908-12-25)
Sutton, Surrey, UK
Died 21 November 1999 (aged 90)
Chorlton-cum-Hardy, Manchester, England, UK
Occupation Writer, illustrator, actor, artist’s model
Notable work(s) The Naked Civil Servant
Quentin Crisp (born Denis Charles Pratt, 25 December 1908(1908-12-25) – 21 November 1999), was an English writer and raconteur. He became an icon of homosexuality in the 1970s after publication of his memoir, The Naked Civil Servant, brought to the attention of the general public his defiant exhibitionism and refusal to keep his sexuality private.
Nothing can bring you peace but yourself.
April 2, 2010Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson (May 25, 1803 – April 27, 1882) was an American essayist, philosopher, and poet, best remembered for leading the Transcendentalist movement of the mid-19th century. His teachings directly influenced the growing New Thought movement of the mid-1800s. He was seen as a champion of individualism and a prescient critic of the countervailing pressures of society.
Emerson gradually moved away from the religious and social beliefs of his contemporaries, formulating and expressing the philosophy of Transcendentalism in his 1836 essay, Nature. As a result of this ground-breaking work he gave a speech entitled The American Scholar in 1837, which Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. considered to be America’s “Intellectual Declaration of Independence”. Considered one of the great orators of the time, Emerson’s enthusiasm and respect for his audience enraptured crowds. His support for abolitionism late in life created controversy, and at times he was subject to abuse from crowds while speaking on the topic. When asked to sum up his work, he said his central doctrine was “the infinitude of the private man.”
We keep going back, stronger, not weaker, because we will not allow rejection to beat us down. It will only strengthen our resolve. To be successful there is no other way.
April 1, 2010Earl G. Graves
Earl Gilbert Graves, Sr. (born January 9, 1935) is an American author, publisher, entrepreneur, philanthropist and founder of Black Enterprise magazine. He currently resides in Scarsdale, New York.
Great things are accomplished by talented people who believe they will accomplish them.
March 29, 2010Warren Bennis
Warren Gamaliel Bennis (born March 8, 1925) is an American scholar, organizational consultant and author, widely regarded as a pioneer of the contemporary field of Leadership studies. Bennis is University Professor and Distinguished Professor of Business Administration and Founding Chairman of The Leadership Institute at the University of Southern California.
“His work at MIT in the 1960s on group behavior foreshadowed — and helped bring about — today’s headlong plunge into less hierarchical, more democratic and adaptive institutions, private and public,” management expert Tom Peters wrote in 1993 in the foreword to Bennis’ An Invented Life: Reflections on Leadership and Change.
Management expert James O’Toole, in a 2005 issue of Compass, published by Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, claimed that Bennis developed “an interest in a then-nonexistent field that he would ultimately make his own — leadership — with the publication of his ‘Revisionist Theory of Leadership’ in Harvard Business Review in 1961.” O’Toole observed that Bennis challenged the prevailing wisdom by showing that humanistic, democratic-style leaders are better suited to dealing with the complexity and change that characterize the leadership environment.
The world is moving so fast these days that the man who says it can’t be done is generally interrupted by someone doing it.
March 27, 2010Elbert Hubbard
Elbert Green Hubbard (June 19, 1856 – May 7, 1915) was an American writer, publisher, artist, and philosopher. He was an influential exponent of the Arts and Crafts movement and is, perhaps, most famous for his essay A Message to Garcia.
Sometimes people who are never alone are the loneliest.
March 22, 2010A. I. Bezzerides
A.I. Bezzerides, (August 9, 1908–January 1, 2007), was an American novelist and screenwriter, best known for writing Noir and Action motion pictures, especially several of Warners’ “social conscience” films of the 1940s.
He was born Albert Isaac Bezzerides in Samsun, Ottoman Empire (now in Turkey), to a Greek-Armenian family who immigrated to America before he was two. He wrote the novel The Long Haul (1938), which got him into the screenwriting business. He wrote such action feature movies as They Drive by Night (1940) – which was based on his novel, The Long Haul (1938), Desert Fury (1947), Thieves’ Highway (1949), On Dangerous Ground (1952), Track of the Cat (1954), and Kiss Me Deadly (1955). He was one of the co-creators of the western television series The Big Valley.
Bezzerides’ most famous script was Kiss Me Deadly, which was a masterful film noir and influenced many directors in France shortly after its release. Beezerides transformed the novel by Mickey Spillane into an apocalyptic, atomic-age paranoia film noir. When asked about his script, and his decision to make “the great whatsit” the Pandora’s Box objective of a ruthless cast of characters, Bezzerides commented:”People ask me about the hidden meanings in the script, about the A-bomb, about McCarthyism, what does the poetry mean, and so on. And I can only say that I didn’t think about it when I wrote it . . . I was having fun with it. I wanted to make every scene, every character, interesting. A girl comes up to Ralph Meeker, I make her a nympho. She grabs him and kisses him the first time she sees him. She says, “You don’t taste like anybody I know.” I’m a big car nut, so I put in all that stuff with the cars and the mechanic. I was an engineer, and I gave the detective the first phone answering machine in that picture. I was having fun.”
In 1940, Warner Bros. offered Bezzerides $2,000 for movie rights to his 1938 novel The Long Haul. He learned later that the script based on his book had already been written. The film, They Drive By Night, starred Humphrey Bogart and George Raft. Bezzerides’ second novel, Thieves’ Market (1949), was adapted to a film known as Thieves’ Highway, directed by Jules Dassin.
The studio also offered Bezzerides a contract to be a screenwriter at a salary of $300 a week. Bezzerides also worked alongside William Faulkner and befriended him. Also, Bezzerides, who at the time was working as a communications engineer for the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, later wrote: “I had no idea whether it was guilt or conscience, or greed to swindle more stories out of me, that motivated Warner Bros. to offer me a seven-year contract … Whatever their reason, I grabbed their offer so I could quit my putrid career as a communications engineer by becoming a writer, writing scripts in an entirely new world.”
His first film credit was 1942’s Juke Girl, which starred Ann Sheridan and Ronald Reagan.
Bezzerides had begun writing short stories as a student at the University of California, Berkeley. At Berkeley, he studied Electrical Engineering. He was first published in a 1935 issue of Story Magazine, which printed his story titled Passage Into Eternity.
Artist Quote of the Day 