Music blows lyrics up very quickly, and suddenly they become more than art. They become pompous and they become self-conscious ... I firmly believe that lyrics have to breathe and give the audience's ear a chance to understand what's going on. Partic...
Byron: The luxuries of this place have made me soft.The metal point's gone from my pen, there's nothing left but the feather. Gutman:That may be true.But what can you do about it? Byron:Make a departure. Gutman:From yourself? Byron:From my present se...
Traveling together into what the poet Adrienne Rich has called ‘the cratered night of female memory,’ they undertook a shared process of self-discovery, working together to probe the possibility of woman’s creative power. Through their explorat...
It takes confidence to be wholeheartedly intimate and passionately committed. Men who are emotionally unavailable have a self-confidence deficit, plain and simple. So man up and get rid of those insecurities or whatever it is that keeps you from open...
As immigrants fly across oceans they shed their old clothing because clothes maketh the man and new ones help ease the transition. Men's clothing has less international variations; the change is not so drastic. But those women who are not used to wea...
You go to a great school not so much for knowledge as for arts and habits; for the habit of attention, for the art of expression, for the art of assuming, at a moment’s notice, a new intellectual position, for the art of entering quickly into anoth...
I keep threatening to keep a formal journal, but whenever I start one it instantly becomes an exercise in self-consciousness. Instead of a journal I manage to have dozens of notebooks with bits and pieces of stories, poems, and notes. Almost every th...
Have I added to their building blocks, shoring them up with strength and their own magnificence? Have I shown them enough color? Did I let them have enough ice cream and leave them alone enough without my anxieties? How can we know which is the right...
While a common reaction to seeing a thing of beauty is to want to buy it, our real desire may be not so much to own what we find beautiful as to lay permanent claim to the inner qualities it embodies. Owning such an object may help us realise our amb...
I also believe that man’s continued domestication (if you care to use that silly euphemism) of dogs is motivated by fear: fear that dogs, left to evolve on their own, would, in fact, develop thumbs and smaller tongues, and therefore would be superi...
If I were asked under what sky the human mind has most fully developed some of its choicest gifts, has most deeply pondered over the greatest problems of life, and has found solutions of some of them which well deserve the attention even of those who...
We should write because it is human nature to write. Writing claims our world. It makes it directly and specifically our own. We should write because humans are spiritual beings and writing is a powerful form of prayer and meditation, connecting us b...
It's not Americans I find annoying; it's Americanism: a social disease of the postindustrial world that must inevitably infect each of the mercantile nations in turn, and is called 'American' only because your nation is the most advanced case of the ...
For what prevents us from saying that the happy life is to have a mind that is free, lofty, fearless and steadfast - a mind that is placed beyond the reach of fear, beyond the reach of desire, that counts virtue the only good, baseness the only evil,...
What are the inner man and woman? Our being consists of two energies: the male and female aspect. Irrespective of if we are a man or a woman, we have both a male and female side. Life develops through opposite poles and tendencies for example yes and...
Bodily agitation, then, is an enemy to the spirit. And by agitation I do not necessarily mean exercise or movement. There is all the difference in the world between agitation and work. Work occupies the body and the mind and is necessary for the heal...
In the two years after No Logo came out, I went to dozens of teach-ins and conferences, some of them attended by thousands of people (tens of thousands in the case of the World Social Forum), that were exclusively devoted to popular education about t...
That done, I sank into an uneasy sleep wherein I dreamed of an assembly line of pale, bloodless girls walking down an endless dark street and moaning softly for help. Somewhere, toward the edge of my inner vision, a shadowy figure pursued them with l...
As the sun went down outside, the television screen started completely lighting up the room in obnoxiously bright colors at hyperactive speeds. The conversation had been slowly rising in volume and frequency, as everyone started becoming more delinqu...
Diversity of opinion in religious belief and its mode is not incompatible with equal possession of the essentials of pure faith, nor at variance with the divine purpose. If an analogy exists between the growth we observe in the vegetable kingdom and ...
Something wonderful begins to happen with the simple realization that life, like an automobile, is driven from the inside out, not the other way around. As you focus more on becoming more peaceful with where you are, rather than focusing on where you...
