One of the greatest boons that can ever come to a human being is to be born on a farm and reared in the country. Self-reliance and grit are oftenest country-bred.
Some people, you have to grit your teeth in order to stay in the same room as them, but you get on and ask the questions you assume most of the people watching want to ask.
Chew on this: Human teeth can detect a grain of sand or grit 10 microns in diameter. A micron is 1/25,000 of an inch. If you shrank a Coke can until it was the diameter of a human hair, the letter O in the product name would be about 10 microns across.
For me, writing post-apocalyptic novels isn't so much about exploding helicopters and fifty-megaton doomsday bombs as it is about the pleasure of dealing with the best of everything that makes us human: cleverness, grit, loyalty, and self-sacrifice.
I have to grit my teeth sometimes, knowing I am going to be written about. But I think it is my life, and I don't want to get people interested in debating it. But I do feel that if you are going to put yourself about as a public person on a television screen, there's a curiosity.
With 'True Grit,' the language was very specific, as is Shakespeare. You couldn't really improvise, nor would you really ever have to. I never felt the need to. It was all so beautifully written, and it was all right there.
When 'Romeo and Juliet' came along, I fell in love with the way that it was written and how innocent and vulnerable it was and how different it was from 'True Grit.' I really liked that.
My character in 'True Grit' would set these goals for herself that seemed near impossible, but to her they were possible. She was never going to believe anything else other than that.
I got down to business and started writing furiously. I wore my fingers down to a callous state writing with every Tom, Dick and Harry around the world, including a chap named Charlie who plays for a man named Bob, to wrestle my emotions and bring out the raw grit hiding in my tightly guarded sub-conscious.
You just have to stand and grit your teeth and know your poll numbers are going to go down - and mine have - but you gotta grit through it because the alternative is unacceptable.
