Shyamalan wrote some dialogue for a birthday party - a turning point, though it never made it to the screen - where the sensitive kid and a chubby kid are just sitting there, friendless and ostracized. The sensitive kid tells the chubby kid, "My mom said God made some of us different, knowing that it'd be hard. But he picked the people who would be different really carefully." Then the sensitive kid leans forward to the chubby kid: "God thinks we’re strong."... "I was only 10," says Haley Joel Osment, "but I could tell it was amazing writing."...I ask why Manoj ever stopped calling himself Manoj. "You are pronouncing it so well," his mother says, sweetly. (It’s Ma-noge.) She says that Shyamalan's teachers used to mangle it, so when he was a teenager he came up with Night. His father tells me that his son always felt a kinship with the Native Americans, and that the word resonated for them because the elders told their children stories around the fire in the evening and because you can see the universe only at night.
They err who, instead of concentrating on commandment keeping and personal spiritual progress, desire sweeping significance and high visibility in the second estate.
I do not exist to impress the world. I exist to live my life in a way that that will make me happy.
You don't tell the quality of a master by the size of his crowds, remember.
Twitter is real life for the people who are on it, but most people are not on Twitter.
Being a critic can lead you to lose sight of the experience of the audience.
The problem with being a professional critic is that you end up consuming so much culture that you stop processing it like a normal person.
But when critics lose sight of why most people consume culture, they start missing what makes most things popular. In their search for significance, they forget about the fun.
Many cultural critics live in an unrepresentative internet bubble. Much of the current divergence between elite discourse and popular preference can be reduced to a simple heuristic: Most critics are on Twitter; most consumers are not. If you examine the coverage proclaiming the end of Harry Potter or Lin-Manuel Miranda, or castigating any other wildly successful cultural product or personality, you’ll quickly spot a pattern: The only evidence they tend to cite is an assortment of tweets.