It's true, Christmas can feel like a lot of work, particularly for mothers. But when you look back on all the Christmases in your life, you'll find you've created family traditions and lasting memories. Those memories, good and bad, are really what h...
My mother moved abroad when I was 11, my dad wasn't around from the time that I was a baby, so I was not the product of a family, but a product of observation - of watching what went on around me, of watching who I liked, what I didn't like, what I t...
If I wanted to do TV full-time, 'Breaking Bad' is definitely the type of project I would want to do. But TV is not my favorite thing in the world. I definitely want to focus on film. It's what I grew up loving. It's always been about movies, movies, ...
I'm with Milton and the Rolling Stones: I don't find the Devil an unsympathetic character. But in any case, my fiction is populated as much by people who do good as it is by those who do bad. I'm interested in imaginatively accommodating as much of t...
I have certain things that I stand for, certain things that I believe in, and if you don't like it and you tell me to go to hell, I think that's your God-given right as a fan. It's one of those deals where I'm that one guy who is outside of that real...
It would be good if teachers could genuinely understand that black English is not mistakes, it's just different English, and that what you want to do is add an additional dialect to black students' repertoire rather than teaching them out of what's t...
The good and wonderful thing about my whole career is that I've always felt that the audience, if I do it well, will track wherever I go, whether it's President or a lawyer or bad guy or good. All I have to do is execute the material enough where the...
First, I eat healthy; it comes from the inside out. If you eat right, your skin, hair, nails will look good. The same if you have negative thoughts - they can give you a bad look, too; we reflect what we eat and think. We also taste and smell what we...
When I went through the Simpson case, I was a cop. Then I was a good cop. Then I was a bad cop. Then I had the media camped out in front of my house when I retired. Then, you know, I am the evilest thing on the planet. Then I write a few books, and t...
You see people, you judge. It's just the human thing to do - good or bad, it's a fact. Like when you get a coffee at Starbucks and the person is rude to you. My mom always says, 'Yeah, but you don't know what kind of day they're having.' You don't kn...
I started out in graduate school to be a fiction writer. I thought I wanted to write short stories. I started writing poems at that point only because a friend of mine dared me to write a poem. And I took the dare because I was convinced that I could...
I've been booed off the field, and I've been carried off the field by people cheering me. So I've seen both ends of it, and I can tell you the bad side of it gets a lot more attention than the good side does, but the good side is pretty darned good w...
Now that I think about it, I was arrested in 1992. Some people may think of that as a bad thing, but I feel good about it. I chained myself to the gate of a phone book factory, a GTE factory in Los Angeles. They were using thousand-year-old trees to ...
Probably I have more phobias, fear and eccentricities than I would care to admit. I don't think I'm in danger of losing my mind, but I do often question my own behavior. I have a very bad temper, and it's not always healthy for me and for others. I m...
It's funny to be discovered by a lot of people who didn't know you before. People always used to say, 'Do you shop at Home Depot?' or 'Does your kid go to such and such school?' They want to know why they know me, even if they don't know my name. I d...
I've never really focused on if I had good habits when I sang or if I had bad habits, or if I was breathing correctly. So, I started doing vocal exercises and would stretch out before I sang, stuff to help my breathing. It's funny, you breathe your w...
Your competition is not other people but the time you kill, the ill will you create, the knowledge you neglect to learn, the connections you fail to build, the health you sacrifice along the path, your inability to generate ideas, the people around y...
Before all this happened, I always used to see my stammer as being a negative, all my life, but then when I went on 'Pop Idol,' and the first time I saw it on television, it was really, really bad, but also it made me stand out; it made people rememb...
I think it's very dangerous for people who do anything that's public to venture on the Web and check out what people are saying about them. Yes, you're bound to find things that will delight you - but you also find things that will make you brood and...
When I was a child, there was very little money, so I've always been concerned for my financial security, which has meant that finding myself as a writer was a bad move. The practical difference the money has made is that I can support myself by fict...
Life is insanely robust, though we can make species go extinct, and this is the bad thing. So I always make the point that you can't say, 'Is it too late?' That is the terrible question, because either answer promotes inaction. If it's too late, you ...