Freedom is a state of mind, I said wondering where I'd heard it before, not a state of being. We are all slaves to gravity and morality and the vicissitudes of nature. Our genes govern us much more than we'd like to think. Our bodies can not know abs...
Men who pride themselves on being shrewd in discovering the weak points, the vanity, the dishonesty, immorality, intrigue, and pettiness of others think they understand character. They know only a part of character. They know only the depths to which...
The sense of tragedy - according to Aristotle - comes, ironically enough, not from the protagonist's weak points but from his good qualities. Do you know what I'm getting at? People are drawn deeper into tragedy not by their defects but by their virt...
We as human beings appear to be in the most adverse stages in our evolution. How can the Mother Earth survive when the souls of Her sons are tainted with avarice, and the very minds which shape Her fate are dominated by ego? Minds that are prone to p...
Empathy is the ability to step outside of your own bubble and into the bubbles of other people. Empathy is the ability that allows us to be useful creatures on this planet; without empathy, we are a waste of oxygen in this world. Without empathy, we ...
If you want more people to come to the theatre, don't put the prices at £50. You have to make theatre inclusive, and at the moment the prices are exclusive. Putting TV stars in plays just to get people in is wrong. You have to have the right people ...
Perhaps it was smartest, after all, to collar your memories and isolate them, sedating the irascible ones, banishing the grotesques, systematizing the rest; maybe coaxing a lion into a wheeled cage on occasion and pulling it eminently around town for...
The power of both myth and art is this magical ability to open doors, to make connections — not only between us and the natural world, but between us and the rest of humanity. Myths show us what we have in common with every other human being, no ma...
I think I was very lucky that I didn't get well-known until my early thirties. If it had happened when I was younger, you might have seen me falling out of nightclubs. I think I conducted myself as a much better human being because I was already marr...
While we are living, our lives are like that of an open book, still being written. Eventually, our book closes for us, and to others, it will be as if we never existed at all. Those of us who write down our life story, will leave a little piece of us...
Couples are jigsaw puzzles that hang together by touching in just enough points. They're never total fits or misfits. ... We marry children who have grown up and still rejoice in being children .... [p. 15]
We marry children who have grown up and still rejoice in being children, especially if we're creative. Imaginative people fidget with ideas, including the idea of a relationship. If they're wordsmiths like us, they fidget a lot in words.
If one is to deal with people on a large scale and say what one thinks, how can one avoid melancholy? I don’t admit to being hopeless, though: only the spectacle is a profoundly strange one; and as the current answers don’t do, one has to grope f...
Every time you see the Wal-Mart smiley face, whistling and knocking down the prices, somewhere there's a factory worker being kicked in the stomach. - Sherrie Ford
Before I was married, I didn't consider my failure to manage even basic hand tools a feminist inadequacy. I thought it had more to do with being Jewish. The Jews I knew growing up didn't do 'do-it-yourself.' When my father needed to hammer something ...
We don't know what our health care costs are going to be. We don't know what our tax rates are going to be. We don't know what our interest rates are going to be. We don't know what our energy costs are going to be. All these uncertainties are being ...
There are always things I find difficult - being in crowds, remembering faces. I do like routines. I always travel with someone. My life in Avignon is a very quiet one. I have an apartment that looks over the whole city. I can drop into town, but a l...
Movies always are open to being remade because times change so much, and the tempo of movies changes. I think of it like a James Bond. They can have different actors play the same role... I've had people come up to me and say, 'We want to remake 'The...
Because my dad's Chinese-American, and they're very concrete, he said, 'There's no money to be made in literature.' So he told me to go into the sciences. And I was a good girl. And I did what Daddy said. And that's how I ended up being a doctor. But...
One of the things I do take some pride in is that if you had never read an article about my life, if you knew nothing about me, except that my books were being set in front of you to read, and if you were to read those books in sequence, I don't thin...
All the great game show hosts have a signature 'look,' from Bob Barker's year-round Brazil Nut-hued tan to Monty Hall's oversized lamb chop sideburns. As the host of IFC's new comedy game show 'Bunk,' I, too, have worked to develop a style signature ...
