We have to nurture our young women and understand the beauty and the strength of being a woman. It's kind of a catch-22: Strength in women isn't appreciated, and vulnerability in women isn't appreciated. It's like, 'What the hell do you do?' What you...
I don't like people who are hypocritical, who pretend to be nice, particularly in show business when they're nice on camera, and then off camera they're absolutely appalling to the makeup people, or the waitress in a restaurant, you know? I don't lik...
I'm a writer of faith who worries about the intolerance of religion. I look at the past and fear we haven't learned from it. I believe that humanity is capable of evil as well as great acts of courage and goodness. I have hope. Deep down, I believe i...
When I was at Brown, I wanted to write the great American novel, but I was too scared to take a creative course. I signed up for one, got in, and just didn't have the courage to go. I was a tremendously shy person, almost pathologically shy. The thou...
'Proof' is a really cool pilot that I was lucky enough to read by Rob Braggin for TNT that's about a surgeon who's an agnostic, tough, grounded, scientific mind and she's hired by a Steve Jobs-type who's just been diagnosed with cancer to focus on ne...
It's been a long struggle. But we've made huge progress. I mean, when I started at Berkeley, women weren't allowed to be part of the band. No women were allowed into the male faculty club. I mean, I was there. I remember that! The worlds were so divi...
For carbon-neutral cities, there are things worth talking about in how our consumption patterns can change - sharing goods, etc. - but those are a fraction of the impacts of transportation and building energy use. If we need to choose priority action...
Climate change is not a discrete issue; it's a symptom of larger problems. Fundamentally, our society as currently designed has no future. We're chewing up the planet so fast, in so many different ways, that we could solve the climate problem tomorro...
There's no really rosy scenario ahead, where climate change just doesn't happen, but I believe we don't have the ethical right to throw our hands up in the air and say, 'Game over.' Whatever pathway we choose, our descendants will be dealing with tha...
I change my socks often, because I had bad bouts of athlete's foot fungus infections as a kid. I may be able to change socks less frequently and not get the fungus. But, I'd rather not run the test to determine just how infrequently I could change so...
Around the time I began starving, in the early eighties, the visual image had begun to supplant text as culture's primary mode of communication, a radical change because images work so differently than words: They're immediate, they hit you at levels...
To complain is always nonacceptance of what is. It invariably carries an unconscious negative charge. When you complain, you make yourself into a victim. When you speak out, you are in your power. So change the situation by taking action or by speaki...
It really gets on my goat that people keep quoting Dorothea Mackellar's 'My Country' as proof that there is no such thing as climate change. A poem written more than 100 years ago by a homesick 19 year old versus an ever-increasing body of refereed s...
I'll take transformational change any way it comes. One way to look at meditation is as a kind of intrapsychic technology that's been developed over thousands of years by traditions that know a lot about the mind/body connection. To call what happens...
Social equity is based on justice; politics change on the opinion of the time. The black man's skin will be a mark of social inferiority so long as white men are conceited, ignorant, unjust, and prejudiced. You cannot legislate these qualities out of...
One of my teachers once said that the way you know you're on the right path is that it works. Now, that doesn't mean you don't run into blocks and brick walls, but it does mean that you can find a way around them or find a way to change yourself or y...
We have domesticated God's transcendence. We often learn about God at about the same time as we are learning about Santa Claus; but our ideas about Santa Claus change, mature and become more nuanced, whereas our ideas of God can remain at a rather in...
I believe that you control your destiny, that you can be what you want to be. You can also stop and say, 'No, I won't do it, I won't behave his way anymore. I'm lonely and I need people around me, maybe I have to change my methods of behaving,' and t...
When it comes to the health of our families, Barack refused to listen to all those folks who told him to leave health reform for another day, another president. He didn't care whether it was the easy thing to do politically - that's not how he was ra...
If my colleagues stop eating donuts and are more active, it saves me money on next year's insurance premium, and I get to work with people who have more energy and creativity each day. Yet most organizations fail to make health a cultural priority. I...
When I first discovered in the early 1980s the Italian espresso bars in my trip to Italy, the vision was to re-create that for America - a third place that had not existed before. Starbucks re-created that in America in our own image; a place to go o...
