We know that the nature of genius is to provide idiots with ideas twenty years later.
Later
I saw my wife at a pool, flipped over her, and 14 days later we were married.
Someone sits at a table or lies on a sofa while staring motionless at a wall or ceiling. Once in a while this person writes down seven lines, only to cross out one of them 15 minutes later, and then another hour passes, during which nothing happens. Who could stand to watch this kind of thing?
The Lumiere brothers first exhibited moving pictures in Paris in 1896. A year later, there was a private showing at the Yildiz palace in Istanbul.
I try to write very fast. I don’t revise very much. I write the poem in one sitting. Just let it rip. It’s usually over in twenty to forty minutes. I’ll go back and tinker with a word or two, change a line for some metrical reason weeks later, but I try to get the whole thing just done.
I read ‘Treasure Island’ for the first time at university. And I started to notice then how unresolved some things were. Later, I realised that Stevenson was interested in sequels, and I wondered whether he would have gone back to it had he lived longer.
The most important American addition to the World Experience was the simple surprising fact of America. We have helped prepare mankind for all its later surprises.
Nelson Mandela went to jail believing in violence, and 27 years later he and his colleagues had slowly and carefully honed the skills, the incredible skills, that they needed to turn one of the most vicious governments the world has known into a democracy. And they did it in a total devotion to non-violence.
I wrote something when I was 9 that seemed pretty good for a 9 year old; it concerned flowers in our family garden – I was grateful my mother praised it. Of course, I found out later it was pretty silly, but it was the first poem I was proud of.
Mama grizzlies mate later than other bears. They have two cubs instead of four. They wait four years – about twice as long as other bears – between having cubs. And after they’re pregnant, if winter is hard or their health is not good or the food supply is uncertain, they re-absorb the embryo into their body.