The very first idea I ever had about making a film... my first thought about ever being a filmmaker was when I was sixteen years old and I wanted to make a Viking movie. And I wanted to make it in old Norse, which I was studying at the time. It's odd...
I'm constantly snatching my books out of the hands of precocious ten-year-olds who are simply too young to read them, despite parents insisting that dear Octavia has a reading age of 28. I remember trying to read 'In Cold Blood' at the age of twelve,...
I gotta tell you, right at the top of my list would be taking vitamins. I know that over the years doctors have said they're ridiculous and all that. But I started taking my vitamins at an early age. And I take them every day. Every bloody day! So I ...
I cannot be alone in being pretty nauseated by Red Nose Day, or at least its television manifestation. Do I think that wretchedly poor children in Africa should get food and life-saving drugs? Of course. Do I want to be hectored into contributing by ...
When I'm not the Tiger Mom, I'm a professor at Yale Law School, and if one thing is clear to me from years of teaching, it's that there are many ways to produce fabulous kids. I have amazing students; some of them have strict parents, others have len...
My first time on TV doing stand-up, I actually did this show in Holland called 'The Comedy Factory' hosted by Jorgen Raymann. It was in 2006 in Holland. It was amazing. I had only been doing stand-up for four years, and I booked that gig through the ...
The first 10 years of my professional life had only to do with running away from my father. He was a wonderful cabinet-maker, and me being the eldest son, I had to take over his shop, his profession and so on and so on. I tried to escape by going to ...
Mom and Dad were married 64 years. And if you wondered what their secret was, you could have asked the local florist - because every day Dad gave Mom a rose, which he put on her bedside table. That's how she found out what happened on the day my fath...
There are so many things I wish I had learned when I was 16 or 17 years old. They would have been game changers in my life.
It's been a long time since humans were prey animals. A hundred thousand years or so. But buried deep in our genes the memory remains: the awareness of the gazelle, the instinct of the antelope. The wind whispers through the grass. A shadow flits bet...
I've put out a lot of little roots these two years," Anne told the moon, "and when I'm pulled up they're going to hurt a great deal. But it's best to go, I think, and, as Marilla says, there's no good reason why I shouldn't. I must get out all my amb...
I couldn't take much more of this. Being the object two men competed for wasn't as glamorous as it sounded in the movies. The two men who both wanted one hundred percent of my time weren't dashing, international playboys. They were undead and surpris...
Annette sighs. Manfred's been upgrading this robot cat for years, and his ex-wife Pamela used to mess with its neural configuration, too: This is its third body, and it's getting more realistically uncooperative with every hardware upgrade. Sooner or...
I spent many years trying to make up reasons about why I had the flashbacks, memories, continuous nightmares. When I finally decided to quit trying to hide from truth, I began to heal.
The ants are bad" The Bear "the ants?"Tahir "Do not be fooled. They look very small, so harm you don't think of then at all. Then years. Then one day you wake up, and your home has fallen down." Osman.
How senseless is everything that can ever be written, done, or thought, when such things are possible. It must be all lies and of no account when the culture of a thousand years could not prevent this stream of blood being poured out, these torture-c...
Memories of the past year came tumbling down on me. The recent changes and reverses were almost overwhelming. I was learning that life flowed like a river. When the run-off was normal, the water ran smoothly. But if there came a downpour, it gushed. ...
How often had she wondered what would have happened if she'd remained with Jonathan? Not often, but regularly over the years. It was impossible not to have imagined that rejected future, a life of many countries, of vast and enduring adventure, of ti...
Drinking gave me a rush of confidence, and for a boy hounded by feelings of inadequacy, the buzz was a welcome relief. What was impossible to realize at the time was that I was shooting myself in the head in some strange time warp where the bullet ta...
It amazes me that we are all on Twitter and Facebook. By "we" I mean adults. We're adults, right? But emotionally we're a culture of seven-year-olds. Have you ever had that moment when are you updating your status and you realize that every status up...
In the years since, I learned that when I am missing Berk or Asta, I can play my tears through my instruments. And the Monitors think I am just improving. They don't know the truth. I play laughter and frustration. I play feelings I cannot define. Bu...
