For people to come to you and say, 'Would you like to be a part of our show?' after years of 'Please tell me I'm good enough,'... I can't tell you how wonderful it feels.
You just don't know when you get all the paint across the canvas how it will turn out. When you step back after you've finished, you say, 'This one is not so good. This one is good.'
I was a very good nurse, but I burned out after eight years or so because it wasn't what I truly wanted to do. Writing is what I belong to.
I'm in Stockholm in my office. I just got here after seeing my eighth child on an ultrasound, so I'm in a good mood. It's beautiful: an energetic little skeleton.
I hated school. After 15, you went off to college if you were good enough. It didn't appeal to me so I left school. I did what everybody did - get a job.
Long after the bomb falls and you and your good deeds are gone, cockroaches will still be here, prowling the streets like armored cars.
A vegetable garden in the beginning looks so promising and then after all little by little it grows nothing but vegetables, nothing, nothing but vegetables.
A person cannot love a plant after he has pruned it, then he has either done a poor job or is devoid of emotion.
Living in New York after 14 years, I'm such an outdoors kind of person. I love gardening and building things. I like restoring old furniture.
Sometimes, as is the case of peach and plum trees, which are often dwarfed, the plants are thrown into a flowering states, and then, as they flower freely year after year, they have little inclination to make vigorous growth.
After graduation in June of 1984, I moved to Manhattan. My first stop was a psychiatrist, who in less than our first fifty-minute session again diagnosed me with depression.
I applied to only one college - the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania - and was fortunate to be accepted. After graduation, I headed to Wall Street and worked as I had dreamed.
After two years of fighting, government shutdowns and little to no agreement on anything except welfare reform in 1996, President Clinton was re-elected and decided it was time for compromise.
But here too it should be noted that the President's approach was to first ask the repressive and brutal Taliban to surrender Osama bin Laden to us, and only after that government refused to do that did we invade.
Japanese people cut their energy use by 25 percent immediately after Fukushima. They showed there was huge opportunity there. And instead, the government simply wants to get those plants up and running again.
Your net worth to the world is usually determined by what remains after your bad habits are subtracted from your good ones.
A tragic irony of life is that we so often achieve success or financial independence after the chief reason for which we sought it has passed away.
It seems to me that trying to live without friends is like milking a bear to get cream for your morning coffee. It is a whole lot of trouble, and then not worth much after you get it.
There was this real fear in doing 'Square Pegs' after getting such a fast ride to glory on 'Saturday Night Live'. I was afraid that the word would be 'peaks early, fails to live up to promise.'
You know that day after day of, Oh God what am I going to do with myself feeling? The fear of the emptiness that it implies keeps me going.
As with most phobias, the fear of flying does make some sense, but if ever there was a fear worth quashing then this is it. After all, life is short, and there's a great big world to explore out there.
