My prayer became 'May I find peace... May I love this life no matter what.' I was seeking an inner refuge, an experience of presence and wholeness that could carry me through whatever losses might come.
The optimum amount of sugar in a product became known as the 'bliss point.' Food inventors and scientists spend a huge amount of time formulating the perfect amount of sugar that will send us over the moon and send products flying off the shelves.
Food became for me a way of becoming self-sufficient with my hands, to regain manual literacy, which I think has been lost on our generation and certainly younger generations. Very few people can actually make things with their hands and do things wi...
My name became known because I was, one might say accidentally the target of state repression and because so many people throughout the country and other parts of the world organized around the demand for my freedom.
When I was very young, I used to share much of what I wrote with my family, but as I got older and more self-conscious, it became a much more private process.
Having lost both my parents as a teenager, family is so important to me, and I cherish my time with my children and grandchildren. I have four children, and they all became lawyers - as I was myself before I got into music.
I came from a lower-middle-class postwar family in a time of austerity and retrenchment, with no one in the family who was in any way artistic or a potential mentor to a budding writer, and yet this is what I became.
Because I didn't have brothers, I was always interested in the kids down the street that had four brothers in their family, so I became one of them - but it was not my family. I've always been attracted to temporary families. They tend to be lost cha...
Finally, after a lot of searching and digging, it was simply the love of family that gave me a road into the character. Once I got into that, and we delved into what it would be like to survive cancer and the ability to see how precious life is, it b...
So I went to Miami in '74 with my family and while I was there it became obvious that we needed money and we needed to do something, because my family, we left without anything really, and we didn't have any money to begin with.
During the 80s and 90s, we all became consumed with ourselves. In the 21st century, we've come back to simpler times. People are struggling economically and this has forced them to scale back the material aspects of their lives and realise the beauty...
So, we just kind of created our own thing and that's part of the beauty of Athens: is that it's so off the map and there's no way you could ever be the East Village or an L.A. scene or a San Francisco scene, that it just became its own thing.
I worked in the family business, which was my father's shoe making company that he had inherited from his father, and that led me to become interested in what could be achieved by a great Italian brand. That became my ambition as a young man.
Led by a new generation of edgy sportswriters like Lipsyte, we found new purpose in the great issues of the day - race, equal opportunity, drugs, and labor disputes. We became personality journalists, medical writers, and business reporters.
In 1958, my father invested everything he had in a business venture and became the largest automobile dealership in Chicago for Ford's new Edsel line. But Edsel sales plummeted and my father fell into bankruptcy. I watched him struggle; working long ...
My father was a small-town banker. He became very ill when I was 10 years old, and we went to California three years later in an attempt to recover his health, which never happened.
You have to take into account it was the cell phone that became what the modern-day concept of a phone call is, and this is a device that's attached to your hip 24/7. Before that there was 'leave a message' and before that there was 'hopefully you're...
In the wealthy industrialized nations, effective drug therapies against AIDS became available - AZT as early as 1987, then combinations of antiretroviral agents in 1996. The new drugs offered hope that fatal complications might be staved off and AIDS...
'Dandelion Wine' became one of the few books that I returned to time and again, and while not anywhere near the story crafter as Mr. Bradbury, I hope I managed to absorb by osmosis some of his techniques.
I was a timid little guy when I was a kid. I used humor as a defense; I became the class clown. But deep inside, I felt real vulnerable.
I surrendered to a world of my imagination, reenacting all those wonderful tales my father would read aloud to me. I became a very active reader, especially history and Shakespeare.
