Though 'Fire and Rain' is very personal, for other people it resonates as a sort of commonly held experience... And that's what happens with me. I write things for personal reasons, and then in some cases it... can be a shared experience.
I feel that the Christian experience and the Jewish one have much to give each other. If this open society continues and there is no return to political anti-Semitism, then this encounter, deeper than any theology, may happen.
The truth is that our unconscious minds are active, purposeful, and independent. Hidden they may be, but their effects are anything but, for they play a critical role in shaping the way our conscious minds experience and respond to the world.
Film is such a bizarre vehicle for acting. It's such a bizarre experience. I don't think you ever really get familiar with it. If you do get familiar with it, you're probably not that good anymore.
God cannot be realized through the intellect. Intellect can lead one to a certain extent and no further. It is a matter of faith and experience derived from that faith.
I have learned that a bitter experience can make you stronger. I now boastfully say that I have a hide like a rhinoceros... and I'm smiling. It's an interesting thing.
Another way of judging the value of a prophet's religious experience, therefore, would be to examine the type of manhood that he has created, and the cultural world that has sprung out of the spirit of his message.
The great awareness comes slowly, piece by piece. The path of spiritual growth is a path of lifelong learning. The experience of spiritual power is basically a joyful one.
With indies, all they have is their script and it's very important to them. The characters are better drawn, the stories more precise and the experience greater than with studio films where sometimes they fill in the script as they're shooting.
In this connection, faith and experience teach us many truths by means of the short-cut of authority and by the proofs of very pleasant and agreeable feelings.
My optimism is not based primarily on the successful march of democracy in recent times but rather is based on the experience of having lived in a fear society and studied the mechanics of tyranny that sustain such a society.
But perhaps the rest of us could have separate classes in science appreciation, the wonder of science, scientific ways of thinking, and the history of scientific ideas, rather than laboratory experience.
No matter how close to personal experience a story might be, inevitably you are going to get to a part that isn't yours and, actually, whether it happened or not becomes irrelevant. It is all about choosing the right words.
I decided early on that I wanted to participate in the greater American experience, rather than the parochial one in Mississippi. But I have an urge as a writer to meld the Southern experience into the larger American one.
I've had the good fortune of teaching and preaching across much of the globe, while also struggling to make sense of my experience in my own tiny world.
Truth be told, I'm not an easy man. I can be an entertaining one, though it's been my experience that most people don't want to be entertained. They want to be comforted.
Any writer who gives a reader a pleasurable experience is doing every other writer a favor because it will make the reader want to read other books. I am all for it.
The thing is, the Tulsa experience that I wrote about in 'The Outsiders' is closer to the universal experience than it would be if I wrote it from L.A. or New York. It's an everyman story.
My poems - I don't even like the sound of that, in a way. Not that anyone else wrote them. But we know that only people who are really close to us care about our personal experience.
I think on-stage nudity is disgusting, shameful and damaging to all things American. But if I were 22 with a great body, it would be artistic, tasteful, patriotic and a progressive religious experience.
I want you, as a reader, to experience what I experience, to let that other world, that imaginary world that I have created, tell you things about the real world.
