Let us not underestimate how hard it is to be compassionate. Compassion is hard because it requires the inner disposition to go with others to place where they are weak, vulnerable, lonely, and broken. But this is not our spontaneous response to suff...
I think there are two aspects to smart environments. One is information embedded in places and things. The other is location awareness, so that devices we carry around know where we are. When you combine those two, you get a lot of possibilities.
My attorney put down the phone after making several calls. “There’s only one place where we can get fresh salmon,” he said, “and it’s closed on Sunday.” “Of course,” I snapped. “These goddamn Jesus freaks! They’re multiplying like...
The writing gets done away from the keyboard and away from the studio in my head, in solitude. And then I come in and hopefully have something, then I wrestle with sounds and picture all day long. But the ideas usually come from a more obscure place,...
You've got to know what your 'thing' is, and you've got to call it a 'thing,' whether it's meanness, nastiness, un-forgiveness, arrogance, ego, resistance, rebelliousness or defiance. Everybody's got a 'thing,' and once you call your 'thing' a 'thing...
I was born in the city's general hospital on November 15, 1930, and we lived at 31 Amherst Avenue in the western suburbs. It was a magical place. There were receptions at the French Club, race meetings at the Shanghai Racecourse, and various patrioti...
One, I have a wonderful publisher, Black Sparrow Press; as long as they exist, they will keep me in print. And they claim they sell very respectable numbers of my books, so I guess, and it's true, every place I go, my books are in libraries and on bo...
My parents took me to the Bronte parsonage in England when I was a teenager. I had a fight with my mum, burst into tears, jumped over a stile and ran out into the moors. It felt very authentic: A moor really is an excellent place to have a temper tan...
A chair's function is not just to provide a place to sit; it is to provide a medium for self-expression. Chairs are about status, for example. Or signalling something about oneself. That's why the words chair, seat and bench have found themselves use...
They dropped like flakes, they dropped like stars, Like petals from a rose, When suddenly across the lune A wind with fingers goes. They perished in the seamless grass, No eye could find the place; But God on his repealless list Can summon every face
Real life this fdar had taught me that in the adult world, fate was chaotic and uncertain. Guidelines for success were arbitrary. But in the world of D&D, at least there was a rule book... By role-playing, we were in control, and our characters... wa...
World War I was the most colossal, murderous, mismanaged butchery that has ever taken place on earth. Any writer who said otherwise lied, So the writers either wrote propaganda, shut up, or fought.
Isn't that wonderful? When we drove through several of the places we lived - Grand Rapids, Washington - they all had those placards. That they stood by the street and had in their hands placards that said 'Gerald Our Ford'. That meant so much to us a...
Facebook has stitched together your social graph. The idea of an interest graph is to bring together everyone that has shared interests. If I can isolate the people who are into mountain biking in Marin, in one place, the ability to put ads against t...
Why fantasize about what you already experience? I go to the written word for places and faces that I don't get at home. Hot people in hot climates. Sex acts I can hardly imagine. Porn is about the unachievable ... and, therefore, the inherently desi...
J.D.: Elliot, I'm thirty years old; I'm single, I'm homeless, and I'm pretty sure I just soiled myself. Elliot: Why don't you just move into my place? J.D.: Oh, great, then we'll be two losers under one roof.
When the culture is strong, you've got this consistency where black people can grow up in these places with this voice just resonating about our special-ness in the universe. And I always say you're in trouble if you get too far away from that core t...
I started my Twitter account for selfish reasons: I wanted to have a place to post updates on my book signing tour and stuff like that. I never realized that I'd have so much fun tweeting. It's become the deleted scenes for my DVD of columns and podc...
It's a big spooky place when you're in it alone. It's like you can hear all the whispers of all the voices of all the actors who ever played here. Kind of creepy. Like a church can be creepy when it's empty. You ever been in a church after hours?
You know what's truly weird about any financial crisis? We made it up. Currency, money, finance, they're all social inventions. When the sun comes up in the morning it's shining on the same physical landscape, all the atoms are in place.
The Tote End itself was demolished in the nineties. Sadly a monstrous IKEA store now stands in it's place. Where once tribes of youths performed their rites of passage and bodily fluids flowed in the name of love, hate and pride; Justin and Kate bick...
