“Don’t get discouraged because there’s a lot of mechanical work to preparing a pitch. There is, and you can’t get out of it. I revised the first slide deck of A Farewell to Arms at least fifty times. You’ve got to work it over. The first draft of anything is shit.
When you first start to pitch you get all the kick and the audience gets none, but after you learn to work it’s your object to convey everything to the audience so that they remember it not as a pitch they have attended but something that happened to themselves.”
Freely adapted from 1984, With Hemingway: A Year in Key West and Cuba by Arnold Samuelson, Quote Page 11, Random House, New York.