Before I had kids, I thought you should never lie to a kid. But now I've had them, I realize you almost lie to them by definition, because if you're trying to summarize something for your 1-year-old, you put it in very simple terms. You only graduall...
I have said with as much sincerity as I can muster that if I were thrown into a dungeon with a sentence of one hundred years, with my only company being an illiterate guard who came twice a day with meals but who never spoke, I would still write - on...
I don't have a permanent place where I live. I'm in Atlanta about six or seven months out of the year. I gave up on my place in New York. I don't have a place in L.A., but sometimes when I go there for the hiatus, I stay in temporary housing. It's al...
Now, we put out a lot of carbon dioxide every year, over 26 billion tons. For each American, it's about 20 tons. For people in poor countries, it's less than one ton. It's an average of about five tons for everyone on the planet. And, somehow, we hav...
You want to know what makes me tick, I'll tell you what makes me tick. I was a boy growing up in Brooklyn; I read a two-penny magazine called 'The Hawk's Nest.' Nobody entered that nest that didn't leave a little richer and a little wiser. And that 1...
Shyam Benegal has found a lovely voice in this film. We've all seen the kind of cinema he's come up with over the years. His films like 'Mandi,' 'Manthan,' 'Sooraj Ka Saatvan Ghoda' all have revolutionised the face of Indian cinema. And in 'Well Done...
A small-time hoodlum who had spent most of the 1960s at San Quentin State Prison in California, the 30-year-old Bryant claimed that he hijacked Flight 97 under orders from his higher-ups in the Black Panther Party; he said his mission was to arrange ...
When people would ask me what I’m addicted to, I always said ‘music.’ And while they’d laugh it off like it’s a cliché, I’m actually a complete shopaholic when it comes to records. I’d literally buy 10 albums a week for years, so when ...
I had crashes when I was small and Gumby-like that would have killed me now. I would just fly off jumps and go 40 or 50 meters when I was 6 years old - break skis, smash my goggles and get a bloody nose and go crawl inside for a little while and then...
And we have done more in the two and a half years that I've been in here than the previous 43 Presidents to uphold that principle, whether it's ending 'don't ask, don't tell,' making sure that gay and lesbian partners can visit each other in hospital...
I find that when I'm struggling to think of how a six-year-old would feel about something, I just have to go right down to the common denominator, find the simplest way that you can look at an object or a problem, and not muck it up with all of the s...
The most impressive airplane ever, I believe, was designed only a dozen years after the first operational jet. Stayed in service till it was too rusty to fly, taken out of service. We retreated in '98 back to something that was developed in '56. What...
I once won a Grammy for an Australian version of 'Turn the Page' that another artist did; I can't remember his name. There've been covers down through the years around the world, but I did like Metallica's, because I kind of related to Metallica when...
And just like that,the cloth was torn. was it the days, weeks of the same argument was it the months without affection, or was it simply the year and a half wasted on empty promises from both sides?I don't know what ripped it, but here I sit with my ...
Francie was ten years old when she first found an outlet in writing. What she wrote was of little consequence. What was important was that the attempt to write stories kept her straight on the dividing line between truth and fiction. If she had not f...
Don't force yourself to write. Some people can write a novel in a few months, whereas for others it can take over a year. I'm lucky to be one of the former - but, even so, if I'm not in the mood to write, I won't. I'll go off, do something else and c...
You can just go to a magic shop or magic builder and buy what most magicians do, but that's not what I'm about. With 'Mindfreak' on television and 'Believe' live, I want to bring things that people have never seen before. That process is very difficu...
But this I know; the writer who possesses the creative gift owns something of which he is not always master--something that at times strangely wills and works for itself. He may lay down rules and devise principles, and to rules and principles it wil...
This country pays a price whenever our economy fails to deliver rising living standards to our citizens - which is exactly what has been the case for years now. We pay a price when our political system cannot come together and agree on the difficult ...
Certainly working with teens keeps me up to date with language and with certain kinds of thinking. I often feel like I have to go back to that 17-year-old Chris Crutcher, and that forms the core voice. I can draw on teens from 1964 to 2001 to find a ...
Forty-two years after Dr. King was murdered, we are still a nation of inequality. People of color, women, gays, lesbians, and others are still treated as second-class citizens. Yes, things have changed but we have still not achieved equality among al...
