One of my favorite times of year is around Christmas when my entire family gets together and we make tamales together. It's a full two-day event, and we create an assembly line. It's awesome because everyone has his or her own part in making the dish...
My dad was the one who really loved basketball, and he was the one that put the basketball in my hands, and my mom was 'Team Mom' of all my teams. I used to play for three or four teams at once and she would just spend her entire afternoon driving me...
You can draw inspiration from anything. If you're a good storyteller, you can take a dirty look somebody gives you, or if a guy you used to have flirtations with starts dating a new girl, or somebody you're casually talking to says something that mak...
My father, Oliver Hynes, was an educator. He was originally just a teacher, a very good one, but then he was promoted to be in charge of education for the entire area. He was always an inspirational teacher. He was my big personal supporter, always c...
The new millennium began with a great global dream. World leaders gathered at the United Nations in 2000 and adopted, among others, a historic goal to reduce poverty by half by 2015. Never in human history had such a bold goal been adopted by the ent...
She saw too that man has the power of exceeding himself, of becoming himself more entirely and profoundly than he is, truths which have only recently begun to be seen in Europe and seem even now too great for its common intelligence.
There are good reasons why we don't want everyone to learn nuclear physics, medicine or how financial markets work. Our entire modern project has been about delegating power over us to skilled people who want to do the work and be rewarded accordingl...
I think rap music is rap music. I mean, are there heavy writing aspects of it? Absolutely. In a sense, is it poetry? Yeah. I've heard that so much, growing up in a house with poetry. But I think people like to use that as a shortcut for who's good an...
I think that humans have a huge capacity to carry pain and sadness. There are things that haunt us our entire lives; we are unable to let them go. The good times seem almost effervescent and dreamlike in comparison with the times that didn't go so we...
It's a strange thing to have a successful television show because if it's too interesting... people don't really pay attention when they watch TV. It has to be good, but not so interesting that you really have to pay attention because people multitas...
You'd expect, as good Darwinian creatures, we would evolve to be fascinated with how the world really is, and we would use language to convey real-world information, we'd be obsessed with knowing the way things are, and we would entirely reject stori...
When I was young, I'd watch guys on 'The Tonight Show', Buddy Hackett, guys like that, where all they'd be is funny. Later, I remember, on 'Late Night with Letterman', I remember he'd have Jay Leno and Richard Lewis as first guests and the entire poi...
You know, Greenwich Village was the traditional bohemia of New York. I wish I could say that was entirely true now. It's, uh... changed. It's now got, God help us, investment bankers and journalists, but it's still a very beautiful part of New York.
The real truths of life are never entirely new to you or to anybody because there is a level deep down within you where you already know all the things, all those spiritual truths that you read or hear, and then recognize them. I say 'recognize' beca...
I wish that the adults who are 'in power' cared more about what their children read. Books are incredibly powerful when we are young - the books I read as a child have stayed with me my entire life - and yet, the people who write about books, for the...
I've literally, in my entire life I've had two guys come up to me and ask me out. Other than that I have had to go and try to like spend time with them, or sort of start the conversation, basically like spell it out in a Sharpie, like, you know?
I see an insidious problem in the marketing of weddings as 'the happiest day of your life.' The pressure that is placed upon this event to be the alpha and omega of your entire existence makes it, I think, into a kind of nuptial New Year's Eve, and w...
Movies don't sit in the theaters for an entire summer like they did in 1982. Now you've got a two- or three-week shelf life so you need to have that awareness right off the bat. And in order to make a lot of people know about your movie, you need to ...
I don't even know if I always entirely get what I'm trying to say right away with lyrics. I like a lot of things that are more subtext. I grew up mishearing lyrics my whole life, but somehow there's so much more, too, that's implied in vocal delivery...
My entire life, I've always known that I wanted to be a performer, but I didn't know exactly how, where or when. I never learned or studied the craft, formally. I grew up doing martial arts and playing piano. But, something inside of me always said t...
We are already so many things by the time we reach the middle of life that it is possible to see that really anything can happen, and that, by extension, anything is doable. I decided I'd write 'The Calling' as someone else. Another writer entirely, ...
