Good short-story collections, like good record albums, are almost always hit-and-miss affairs - successful if they include three or four great tracks, wildly successful if they have five. And that's as it should be.
I loved my 17 years with R.E.M., but I'm ready to reflect, assess and move on to a different phase of my life. The four of us will continue our close friendship, and I look forward to hearing their future efforts as the world's biggest R.E.M. fan.
Have four things going. I have stand-up comedy, two television shows and I'm working on a play. I like to work, and I fear that something could fall through. You know what they say: 'The show must go off.'
I spent four months in Prague in these blue rooms reacting to nothing and you basically place your faith in the hands of the director and the special effects co-coordinator and you keep your fingers crossed and hope that the creatures look really sca...
For the record, I believe elected officials should talk about faith. Our founders believed the moral principles of faith were indispensable to our nation's survival. The Declaration of Independence mentions God four times.
And also I didn't want my future to be just sitting in a room and be imprisoned in my four walls and just cooking and giving birth to children. I didn't want to see my life in that way.
All the lessons of history in four sentences: Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad with power. The mills of God grind slowly, but they grind exceedingly small. The bee fertilizes the flower it robs. When it is dark enough, you can see the...
What's missing is leadership in the White House. And the story that Barack Obama does tell, forever shifting blame to the last administration, is getting old. The man assumed office almost four years ago - isn't it about time he assumed responsibilit...
Short stories are wonderful and extremely challenging, and the joy of them, because it only takes me three or four months to write, I can take more risks with them. It's just less of your life invested.
There have only been about a half dozen genuinely important events in the four-billion-year saga of life on Earth: single-celled life, multicelled life, differentiation into plants and animals, movement of animals from water to land, and the advent o...
I'm not really that private of a person. I live in a small town and I'm very neighborly. I go out to dinner just about four nights a week and sit and talk to people. I'm not that private, so it's not that strange to do an interview and try to share a...
I record cello Etudes that are fewer than four minutes long and post them on YouTube. How can one execute fully-formed ideas with utmost perfection, yet stay free enough to allow improvisatory nuance? This has immediate application in almost every ar...
Whatever you perceive, you always make a story with yourself as the main character, and that dictates your life. Then when you read 'The Four Agreements', you hear another voice beneath the story, the voice that comes from your integrity, your spirit...
My daughter, when she was a week old, was diagnosed with congenital heart disease. For the past thirteen years, she's had four major heart surgeries. She's a candidate for - and must have - heart replacement surgery in order to have a long life.
Sometimes you're doing really well, then, after three or four years, everything inexplicably crashes like a house of cards and you have to rebuild it. It's not like you get to a point where you're all right for the rest of your life.
The worst thing that can happen to you in travel is having a gun pointed at you by a very young person. That's happened to me maybe four times in my life. I didn't like it.
People get so trapped by their technology now. Real life is so much better. I love talking with my mother and father. We really enjoy staying in and making a meal together. I'm very close with all four of my older sisters as well.
I believe in process. I believe in four seasons. I believe that winter's tough, but spring's coming. I believe that there's a growing season. And I think that you realize that in life, you grow. You get better.
Because of the increase in life longevity, America can now assume that at any given time three, and perhaps four, former presidents will still be alive, even when the current president is occupying the White House.
Football became my life at five or six. The earliest memory I have is of playing in my first boots, a pair of black and white Alan Balls. It was 1970, four years after the World Cup, and I scored three goals at school.
You know, my first three or four drafts, you can see, are on legal pads in long hand. And then I go to a typewriter, and I know everybody's switching to a computer. And I'm sort of laughed at.
