A lie will easily get you out of a scrape, and yet, strangely and beautifully, rapture possesses you when you have taken the scrape and left out the lie.
I think I had the smallest handle around. When I got my bats, I even trimmed them down. I used to scrape them. Some years later when I started getting older, I used to start with a 33 and in the summer it got down to 31 and then probably in September got down to 30.
I got in trouble with the police, and that was a rude awakening. That was it. I'd seen the bottom of the pit, and it was time to scrape myself out of it.
You can't make a living as a playwright. You can barely scrape by.
So now, thirty years, forty years later, I mean, I could find a whole orchestra of a thousand to put these things together in New York City alone. In those days, if I could scrape up twenty musicians to do this it was something extraordinary.
Any character can find an audience and work if you have passion for that character. You might have to just scrape off the dirt and the barnacles and pull it out and highlight it.
Writing my first book, I think in hindsight I went into it saying, 'It's gonna sell.' I was earning enough to scrape by sometime around a book or two before 'Tell No One.' I moved up from $50,000 to $75,000, then $150,000 for each book. I had never thought I would be doing anything else. I had enough encouragement.
Akismet started on a $70 dollar-a-month server. Anyone can scrape together $70.
So now I'm left with cigarettes, and I'm trying to scrape that off my shoe and then I'll be done.
I try to cover myself, to have another movie under way before the last one comes out. I've been able to just scrape by, holding out for good parts instead of taking anything.