Nick Denton Quotes

I love the fact that you collaborate with your readers when you write a book.

Everything I publish is for my readers.

Probably, subliminally, I think of the reader as a kind of collaborator. I don't want to say something for the reader that the reader could have said for himself.

I'd love to work on a script in collaboration.

That's the thing: once it's in their hands, it's not my book anymore, it's theirs. I have no idea what happens when they start to digest it. So when someone writes me to explain how they read it, what it was like, what they enjoyed, there's a thrill. Writers who don't make their email addresses public are missing out on something wonderful.

It's interesting with my blog, because it feels to me less like a blog and more like a forum, because my readers are so funny and leave hysterical comments. And I'm not being humble when I say that very often, the comments are so much better than the post originally was.

I sometimes work with a communications and media training firm called KNP Communications. It's nice to bring the research to the practitioners; I learn a lot watching how they put it into practice, and I know they like to be on top of what's happening on the research front.

I love bouncing my words off of someone else's, and the fact that writing a story with someone else guarantees you'll get something you never, ever would have written on your own.

I've always said that my favorite aspect of online political writing is how interactive and collaborative it is with one's readers: that has always been, and always will be, crucial in so many ways to what I do.

It would be easier to write a novel without reader input, but I feel the fiction is richer for it.

The beauty of open-source is that you can pick up right where someone left off and start right there.

Co-creation is much more work than writing somewhere in a hidden corner and then publishing your content. However, the benefits outweigh the costs.

I'd love to write for other people.

It's much like writing a screenplay with someone else and that's how we view it, I think.

There is a lot to be said for collaboration, and it should be seen as just another way to do things as it is in other forms of writing, such as for television, where it is standard practice.

The network is opening up some amazing possibilities for us to reinvent content, reinvent collaboration.

If you're going to write a song, try to get together with a collaborator because it's better to write with collaborators.

I love writing with other artists, I really do. Because you can try to guess what they would want to say and how they would sing it.

I write a book a year while creating TV and film projects. And being a writer isn't just writing: I have to chase down paychecks and manage foreign tax payments. I maintain a vibrant relationship with readers and bloggers. And when it comes to Hollywood, I typically have to have fifteen business meetings in the hopes that one leads to a project.

The living together is very important in a way. It's important for writing. It wouldn't be important if we were like just getting other people's numbers together, we'd just have to meet at rehearsals, but writing is something almost completely different.

I guess I think I'm writing for people who are smarter than I am, because then I'll be doing something that's worth their time. I'd be very afraid to write from a position where I consciously thought I was smarter than most of my readers.

Love is a story we tell with another person. It's cocreation through conarration. When you hit bumps in the road and challenges, you write a new chapter in your story together. Love is the constant act of revising and retelling your own story in real time. You don't do it by yourself. You do it with someone else. The only way you do that is to talk to each other and create a shared narrative.

The challenge is the same whether or not I'm collaborating: to empathize with your reader and to tell a story that will matter to him or her. But the mechanics of going about that challenge change when you're collaborating, because you have someone to help refine your thinking and expand your vision of what might happen.

I wrote the plot [for the Persepolis ]and Vincent [Paronnaud] and I wrote and discussed the shooting of the script. Vincent then took care of the production design, the actual shooting, and what was going on within each scene. It's very difficult, though, to draw a line between who did what. Because Vincent would say something, and I would add something, and at the end you have this film, yet no clear idea of who did what.

Creator and reader are partners in the invisible creating something out of nothing, time and time again.