The brain builds a version of the universe and projects this version of the universe like a bubble all around us. So I can say with some certainty, 'I think therefore I am.' But I cannot say, 'You think therefore you are,' because you are within my p...
There are technical tricks that may help you create more effective characters. My approach to characterization is not at all technical. I can't really analyze how I do it, but I am sure of one thing. To write convincing characters, you must possess t...
The real world just doesn’t offer up as easily the carefully designed pleasures, the thrilling challenges, and the powerful social bonding afforded by virtual environments. Reality doesn’t motivate us as effectively. Reality isn’t engineered to...
When I grew up, the Devil was a reason why I had a headache or the Devil was the reason I got mad today. We always blamed the Devil. I think today when I say the Enemy, I like to make it broader. Sometimes the Enemy can be our own thoughts.
For a while... to be an evangelical meant you were a white Republican, and you were against this and against that. I don't want to be put into that mold, because then people judge you before they even listen... I don't want to divide the very people ...
The soul is both the most fragile and most resilient thing about you; a healthy soul is what holds you together when your world falls apart. Since you will carry your soul into eternity, it's worth checking up on it at least as often as your teeth.
He’d mesmerized her, held her soul captive. And she couldn’t move. “Unless you want more than a dream,” he said. She did. “Will you stay?” he whispered. “Or will you go?” She stayed. Heaven help her, she stayed. And Michael showed her...
By the end of the 1980s, Seattle had taken on the dangerous lustre of a promised city. The rumour had gone out that if you had failed in Detroit you might yet succeed in Seattle - and that if you'd succeeded in Seoul, you could succeed even better in...
Plenty of people out there think of me as the Antichrist or the devil incarnate because I do not affirm the literal patterns of the Bible. But the fact is I can no more abandon the literal patterns than I could fly to the moon. I just go beyond them.
The Christians tried to separate themselves from the Jewish crowd so they wouldn't be the recipients of the persecution of the Romans. And the way they did it was to say, the Jews killed our hero too. And so Christians began to define themselves over...
I cannot possibly conceive of my planet Earth as the centre of a three-tiered universe. I know rather that the sun, around which my planet Earth revolves, is a middle sized star in a galaxy called the Milky Way that has over a hundred billion other s...
My whole thing was, if I can put in 5 percent of the effort of somebody getting an A, and I can get a C minus, that’s amazing,” he explains. “It’s certainly good enough, right? [Then] I can take the other 95 percent of the time and invest it ...
If you want to put golf back on the front pages again, and you don't have a Bobby Jones or a Francis Ouimet handy, here's what you do: You send an aging Jack Nicklaus out in the last round of the Masters and let him kill more foreigners than a genera...
When my second child was born, I gave up acting - two young children out on the road was too difficult to manage. I'd always written, but began to do so with real commitment now that it was my only creative outlet. I used all my acting techniques to ...
Sense the blessings of the earth in the perfect arc of a ripe tangerine, the taste of warm, fresh bread, the circling flight of birds, the lavender color of the sky shining in a late afternoon rain puddle, the million times we pass other beings in ou...
I could fill my whole time doing interviews, speaking to crowds, and there's this natural human tendency because of our culture to think that the more people I talk to, the bigger the impact I'll have, and yet Jesus didn't spend His time just speakin...
If I'm flying to China, I can sit and think about a problem. Other scientists have to go to the lab. I'm always thinking about maths, even when I'm doing other things. A lot of the time you're going up blind alleys and it's very frustrating, but then...
Language just gradually came in, one or two stressed words a time. Before then, I would just scream. I couldn't talk. I couldn't get my words out. So the only way I could tell someone what I wanted was to scream. If I didn't want to wear a hat, the o...
Sir Francis Walsingham: Madam, if I may. A prince should never flinch from being blamed for acts of ruthlessness which are necessary for safeguarding the state and their own person. You must take these things so much to heart that you do not fear to ...
[King is writing a letter to his girlfriend] Francis: It ain't D-E-R-E, it's D-E-A-R. And "Sarah" ain't got no two R's, King. Damn, you dumb! King: It don't make no difference. She know what I mean. She don't read too good nohow.
[first lines] Prof. Charles Francis Xavier: [narration] Mutation: it is the key to our evolution. It has enabled us to evolve from a single-celled organism into the dominant species on the planet. This process is slow, and normally taking thousands a...
