That's what I love about songwriting - that you can write something about your own experiences and think it's completely specific to you, and then people can take away a completely different meaning for themselves. I really love that. I think you've ...
Marriage is a lot of things - a source of love, security, the joy of children, but it's also an interpersonal battlefield, and it's not hard to see why: Take two disparate people, toss them together in often-confined quarters, add the stresses of mon...
As an ex-stand up, I can tell you that a comedy club isn't a place you go looking to get the abuse you just can't seem to find in daily life. The stage is a performer's domain. You protect that domain. You are not on stage to take what's given just '...
One of my earliest memories is of seeing my mother in her beach chair, reading a book under an umbrella by the water's edge while my sisters and I played beside her. Of all the life lessons she taught me, that is one of my favorites: to take time at ...
The world that we live in is full of distractions and pleasures that pull us away from a spiritual life. Even our jobs which are a very necessary and important part of our lives can end up being the altar at which we pray. They consume most of our wa...
Time travel and teleportation will have to wait. It may take centuries to master these technology. But within the coming decades, we will understand dark matter, perhaps test string theory, find planets which can harbor life, and maybe have Brain 2.0...
When I was nine years old, living on the south side of Chicago, my father was a minister and my mother used to scrub floors. I had seven brothers and four sisters. I told my mama, 'One of these days I'm going to be big and strong and buy you a beauti...
One posthumous measure of a person's life is how often you imagine his impossible return to deal with some event he never lived to encounter. You picture his reactions, his advice, his sage commentary and humorous asides. For instance, I think about ...
I don't think I suffered with depression, I don't think I'm a depressed type of person - I just think I suffered a depression to do with snooker, and I just couldn't handle it. I could go out and play, but take me out of there and I couldn't do life....
I want a partner in crime and a Bonnie to my Clyde. I've just been so focused on my career. Women don't like being number two, so I've been glad to keep my distance so I could focus on me, get my life together and take care of my mom without disappoi...
My personal take on politics is I deal with social situations and cultural situations in my music and in my life. I have said on record many times that I haven't voted. I'm not the type of person who says, 'I'm never going to vote.' I think it's clea...
I think that what we need to do is say, 'Reading is going to really affect your life.' You take a black man who doesn't have a job, but you say to him, 'Look, you can make a difference in your child's life, just by reading to him for 30 minutes a day...
It's feasible that we'll meet other sentient life forms and conduct commerce with them. We don't now have the technology to physically travel outside our solar system for such an exchange to take place, but we are like Columbus centuries ago, learnin...
I was born in the summer of 1970, the last of five boys stretched over eight years. My parents were a struggling young couple who had been married one afternoon under a shade tree by a preacher without a church. No guests or fancy dress, just the two...
A perfectly fitted sheath dress that can take you from day to night is something that every woman should have in her closet. You can't go wrong with black, but a little bit of color is nice. I love a lot of color, personally. You can accessorize a sh...
I have always been very choosy, but as you grow older, your tolerance for crap becomes less. The role I will do today has to justify the time I take away from my kids and my husband. I love them, spend a lot of time with them and love doing things fo...
To boast takes great courage. Being left speechless with joy is not for the weak. We forget to be surprised by everyday miracles, like toast springing up, the mesmerizing blue in the sky, or even simple friendships. To touch and remember this delicat...
Most people are motivated by the economy. And if you've lost your job, lost your mortgage, lost your 401(k), you're angry. And if your brother-in-law has lost one of those you're angry still. And when you're angry you take it out on people who are in...
Virtually everywhere in the world, people still wake up and want their country to be more like the United States than any other nation. We are the envy of the world because of what we stand for and how our democratic process, flawed as it may often s...
My good friend the Governor said I could settle down at Port Stanley and take things quietly for a few weeks. The street of that port is about a mile and a half long. It has the slaughterhouse at one end and the graveyard at the other. The chief dist...
I was so tired of this ceaseless, day-to-day tug-of-war between my hormones and my head, my vanity and my virtue. I felt very much as though I were caught in the middle of some dreadful battle in which taking a side of my own would mean certain miser...