My mother, a teacher, encouraged me to use my creativity as an actual way to make a living, and my father, a Mississippi physician, did two things. First, he taught me that all human beings should be treated equally because no one is better than anyo...
Everyone else thinks I'm a nonfiction writer. I think it's because my nonfiction is easier to find. But I write both in equal measure. I love writing fiction because I can totally lose myself, and I get to make up the rules of the world that I'm writ...
The need to make music, and to listen to it, is universally expressed by human beings. I cannot imagine, even in our most primitive times, the emergence of talented painters to make cave paintings without there having been, near at hand, equally crea...
One of my most memorable Thanksgiving memories was probably the first year that me and my two brothers decided to start our annual eating contest. We ate throughout the whole day. We started that morning and weighed ourselves, and at the very end of ...
Not all television scripts are created equal. And the process is ridiculous. They send you a script and want you in the next morning. That's not how acting works. You can do anything to me as an actor; I'm a very resilient guy. Just don't rush me. If...
Antonio Salieri: Leave me alone. Father Vogler: I cannot leave alone a soul in pain. Antonio Salieri: Do you know who I am? Father Vogler: It makes no difference. All men are equal in God's eyes. Antonio Salieri: [leans in mockingly] *Are* they?
My question was:How did I go from merely seeing the dirty French Santa in a bar to being in his hotel room the next morning? And this presented me with an actual equation. How did one plus one equal old French Santa?
With each piece I've completed I have worked to make it intact, and each of them has been an equal high. It's like children. A mother refuses to pick out one as a favorite, and I can't do any better with the dances.
It does no service to the cause of racial equality for white people to content themselves with judging themselves to be nonracist. Few people outside the clan or skinhead movements own up to all-out racism these days. White people must take the extra...
The point I am trying to make is that words are a mysterious, ambiguous, ambivalent, and perfidious phenomenon. They can be rays of light in a realm of darkness. . . . They can equally be lethal arrows. Worst of all, at times they can be one or the o...
What if we all stopped fighting to belong and realized that we already do? What if we acknowledged, in each interaction with ourselves and with others, the eternal, beautiful interconnected energy that flows between us? What if we recognized our equa...
He proved that it was equally true if the disregard was by a ruler or by a people. "It spreads like a disease," he said. "And it's infinitely more deadly when the law is disregarded by men pretending to act for justice than when it's simply inefficie...
Size matters in fiction, but so does lack of size. Everything else being equal, fat novels tend to be perceived as serious, very thin ones as more honest, more real. Writers address these age-old expectations by filling their big books with philosoph...
Television is the same as the telephone, and the same as the World Wide Web for that matter. People who become obsessed by the peculiarities of these communications media have simply failed to adjust to the shock of the old. People who bleat on about...
Rhett, do you really--is it to protect me that you--" "Yes, my dear, it is my much advertised chivalry that makes me protect you." The mocking light began to dance in his black eyes and all signs of earnestness fled from his face. "And why? Because o...
Jai, she pleaded quietly, if you hadn’t noticed, I’m a guts and glory kind of girl. I think I’d die trying to protect anyone I care about. It’s just the way I’m wired, I guess. I would die trying to protect Charlie because I love him. He’...
The fact that Ridge has been honest in his conversations with me is not something he did wrong. The fact that he has feelings for me also isn’t wrong, when you know exactly how much he’s fought those feelings. People can’t control matters of th...
Growing up in Fitzgerald, I lived in an intense microcosm, where your neighbor knows what you're going to do even before you do, where you can recognize a family gene pool by the lift of an eyebrow, or the length of a neck, or a way of walking. What ...
I got tired, I told him. Not worn out, but worn through. Like one of those wives who wakes up one morning and says I can't bake any more bread. You never bake bread, he wrote, and we were still joking. Then it's like I woke up and baked bread, I said...
Akela: [to his fellow wolves about Mowgli] Shere Khan will surely kill the boy and all who try to protect him. Now, are we all in agreement as to what must be done? [the wolves nod] Akela: Now it is my unpleasant duty to tell the boy's father. Rama? ...
It is an adherent condition of human affairs that no intention, however sincere, of protecting the interests of others can make it safe or salutary to tie up their own hands. Still more obviously true is it, that by their own hands only can any posit...
