'Dear Mr. Henshaw' came about because two different boys from different parts of the country asked me to write a book about a boy whose parents were divorced, and so I wrote 'Dear Mr. Henshaw,' and it won the Newbery, and I was - it's been very popul...
I think I was probably looking for gay role models when I was younger, before I even knew or thought I was gay. I didn't really make the connection that they were gay, but I felt drawn to them because they were going against the grain, and I knew the...
You can change your life or not change it. It really doesn’t matter in the end. Life as humans live it is too fleeting, too incidental, too miniscule for the universe to keep forever. So just do good to others; be good, all because it makes you hap...
I was in my early twenties and I was, to be quite honest, a bit of a punk. A swaggering entitled straight white guy who hadn't but a lot of thought into what it might be like to be anything other than a straight white guy. Because when you're a strai...
Freud was a genius; geniuses are bright but not necessarily right. What they do do, right or wrong, is to provide images that guide, or compel, the lives of the rest of us. If we are not careful we may accept the inevitability of these images. It see...
In L.A., we have a saying - 'What do you do?' It's less of a question and more of a self-defense mechanism for wayward screenwriters looking to slip you a first draft, or the occasional actor looking to get in on the latest shoot. But I hate the ques...
Sir, pay no attention to the people who say the glass is half empty, because 32% means it's 2/3 empty. There's still some liquid in that glass is my point, but I wouldn't drink it. The last third is usually backwash. (Said to President Bush at the Wh...
My mother made me take piano lessons, and because I am her oldest and she had not yet been worn down by the task of prodding five children to practice every day, she kept me practicing despite my whining.
This boy was likely to die soon, but he died yesterday - because of a doctor's arrogance, his unwillingness to seek a consult, his neglect to get a full and thorough history. Arrogance! We are clinicians, scientists. We observe time-honored procedure...
Where ego comes in, loving kindness departs. So wherever there is ego, there is very little space for true bliss and true happiness because true bliss and true happiness isn't exclusive to the attachments the ego enjoys playing with, but rather a fre...
I think we've already voted at the U.N., in the Security Council, to get rid of nuclear weapons. Let's get rid of them. Let's get rid of ours and then Iran will stop, I believe. And so everybody else will, because if everybody doesn't have them, then...
I grew up partially in L.A. and partially in New York. In L.A., anything goes because it's really temperate. There aren't any fashion rules dictated by weather, whereas in New York, of course, there are. New York is seasonal, and also it's a fashion ...
I used to say to myself, 'Well, in the old days everybody danced because they loved to dance, and there was none of this professional garbage going on about how much can you get for this or that or the other, or any of the kinds of things that insecu...
My father was the editor of an agricultural magazine called 'The Southern Planter.' He didn't think of himself as a writer. He was a scientist, an agronomist, but I thought of him as a writer because I'd seen him working at his desk. I just assumed t...
Once upon a time, they say, there was a girl...there was a boy...there was a person who was in trouble. And this is what she did...and what he did...and how they learned to survive it. This is what they did...and why one failed...and why another triu...
I don't mean what other people mean when they speak of a home, because I don't regard a home as a...well, as a place, a building...a house...of wood, bricks, stone. I think of a home as being a thing that two people have between them in which each ca...
There are very few professions in which people just sit down and think hard for five or six hours a day all by themselves. Of course it's why you want to become a writer — because you have the liberty to do that, but once you have the liberty you a...
If women had power, what would men be but women who can't bear children? And what would women be but men who can?...I mean, men give her [a queen] power. They let her use their power. But it isn't hers, is it? It isn't because she's a woman that she'...
We live in a microwave life where people want success without passing through the process of hard work. This is because our daily discussions focus on successes and not our struggles, which end up sending wrong message to other people, believing that...
In a battle the "strong" is often weak and the "weak" is strong. Never under estimate ANYONE...Break someone as you may but remember that God heals and Restores that which is broken. In the END HE will decide who is Strong and who is Weak. So treat p...
It is comic that a mentally disordered man picks up any piece of granite and carries it around because he thinks it is money, and in the same way it is comic that Don Juan has 1,003 mistresses, for the number simply indicates that they have no value....
