Hanneli Mustaparta Quotes

Longreads embodies a lot of what we really value with Automattic and WordPress.

Every show I've ever, you know, produced, essentially it's the show I want to watch myself.

I think probably the thing I'm worst at is the most ephemeral stuff, like blogs. I find it really hard to write. And I'm often been asked to write columns for papers in Peru. And I can't. I would die. There's no way I could write a column.

I have a problem with blogs - all the best writers benefit from edits.

And I haven't read a lot of blogs but if someone writes about what they care about I'm sure it's interesting.

We don't feel pressure of, 'Let's make this really raunchy.' It's more about making a good story, which is 10 times harder. The raunchy stuff's really easy for us.

Good scripts are hard to find.

A blog is neither a diary nor a journal. Many people think of blogging in relation to those two things, confessional or practical. It is neither but includes elements of both.

I read a lot of bad scripts and weird television shows. I don't know. There's a lot of work out there I was reading at 14 years old and noticing this lack of thought. And then, reading 'Afterschool,' that's full of thought. It was bursting with ideas.

If you write really good material, the rest just falls into place. There's really no trick to it.

Good writing is everything.

The question now is can better content be driven solely by more money. I have learned in 26 years that only money cannot give you best content.

As writers, we have to make our own work - as bloggers, writing for video games, whatever we can do. Everyone breaks into the business in a different way.

The challenges of writing a book are very different from writing a blog or tweets. I've been writing a blog since I was in the 6th grade, so I had this style of writing that was definitely not proper for writing a book.

There aren't enough good scripts.

When I'm blogging, I think book writing is easier and vice versa. Writing is lonely work, and the good thing about blogging is that you have immediate feedback from commenters.

I love blogging, even though apparently it's still dying, and hate it when I have too much going on to do so regularly.

I like finding talent. That's what really turns me on, I suppose.

Start writing the things that you are reading or that you want to be published doing.

One of the principals of composition, I would say, in fiction, is you want to do what you can do a lot of. You want to do what you're enthusiastic about and what rings your bell. In this case, almost every decision I made was on that basis.

When you are writing, you are - from society's point of view - only producing the first version which will then be processed and recycled.

It's a mission for me to make sure that philanthropy doesn't feel like a vintage hand-me-down from mom or dad. I want people to feel compelled to do something positive because they just love it, they're excited about it, and it's cool.

She [Carol Parsinan] somehow read my poems and came back to me and convinced me that I could be a poet, that I had the passion and the enthusiasm and the creativity to become a poet, but that what I was writing was not poetry because I was just expressing my feelings and I wasn't try to make anything.

Whether I'm in front of the camera, behind the camera, at my computer writing a novel or a screenplay, as long as I get to entertain someone out there, I'm happy.

It's hard to build community around mediocre and mundane writing.