I think a lot of Americans have never been all that hungry. They've never had war on their shore, and they've never suffered the way other cultures have suffered. I'm not saying we should go suffer. Not at all. I'm saying we should be more aware of h...
I move countries every three or four years. I was born in London, and we lived in Canada. Then we lived in Saudi Arabia until the Gulf War broke out, when we were forced to leave. Then we hop-scotched for a while from Holland back to Canada back to S...
Whenever I speak at the United Nations, UNICEF or elsewhere to raise awareness of the continual and rampant recruitment of children in wars around the world, I come to realize that I still do not fully understand how I could have possibly survived th...
The thing that really gets to me is that countries are in the news only when things get out of hand. That's when it's newsworthy. When the war ends, it's not newsworthy anymore; no one wants to think about it. Actually, the aftermath is the most impo...
With acting, you wanna see if you can get into trouble without knowing how you're gonna get out of it. It's like the exact opposite of war, where you need an exit strategy. When you're acting, you should get all the way into trouble with no exit stra...
During the Gulf War, I remember two little third grade girls saying to me - after I read them some poems by writers in Iraq - 'You know, we never thought about there being children in Iraq before.' And I thought, 'Well those poems did their job, beca...
I was a bit of a delinquent growing up, a very poor student - I nearly failed several grades before dropping out of high school and getting a G.E.D. But I still read a lot. Thrillers and war novels, mostly, along with the occasional literary novel fr...
The whole point of being in the Army is wanting to get killed, wanting to test yourself to the limits. Now you have to fly 15,000ft above the war zone to avoid getting hit. I don't think there is any point in having wars if that's how you're going to...
I don't like fantasy where a king snaps his fingers and suddenly a whole army appears and goes off to war - he's got to feed them, he's got to pay them, he's got to take care of the camp followers and the gamblers and the people who cause disorder.
Every snapshot collector has obsessions. Some only collect photos of cars. Others like World War II, or babies, or old-timey girls in old-timey swimsuits. I happen to collect the weird stuff: photos that make the hair on the back of your neck stand u...
Our ascendancy of the past two centuries - first Europe and then the U.S. - has bred a western-centric mentality: the West is the fount of all wisdom. We think of ourselves as open-minded, but our sense of superiority has closed our minds. We never e...
Dogmatism of all kinds--scientific, economic, moral, as well as political--are threatened by the creative freedom of the artist. This is necessarily and inevitably so. We cannot escape our anxiety over the fact that the artists together with creative...
Human freedom involves our capacity to pause between the stimulus and response and, in that pause, to choose the one response toward which we wish to throw our weight. The capacity to create ourselves, based upon this freedom, is inseparable from con...
Of course, the fact that Dostoevsky can tell a juicy story isn’t enough to make him great. If it were, Judith Krantz and John Grisham would be great fiction writers, and by any but the most commercial standards they’re not even very good.
Now, whatever you do, don't say anything, because no one must know that Liberace is gay." "Excuse me?" I said. "I'm eight. I know he's gay.
Be a good listener in the special way a story requires: note the manner of presentation; the development of plot, character; the addition of new dramatic sequences; the emphasis accorded to one figure or another in the recital; and the degree of enth...
She and Naomi had joked about the sexuality of camera apertures, that they needed to write a woman’s monograph on the symbolism and cultural relevance of the mechanics of image-making as it related to sex, so that, for example, stopping down the fi...
Your whole world ceases to exist and you're nothing but a shell of a person you once were. Your mom has dealt with it her way, me in mine, and you in yours," he said, lifting his hand off of John's gravestone and rising. "Your mom hates the world, I ...
Human nature turns out to be more complicated than the idea that people will get along if only the rules are clear enough. Uncertainty, the ultimate evil that modern law seeks to eradicate, generally fosters cooperation, not the opposite.
TV news is like kryptonite to children. The two major shifts in taste for children to adulthood are news and mustard. Kids hate news and mustard. Well, mustard even has the word 'turd' in it. Maybe I should threaten my kids that if they don't go to b...
Travel does not exist without home....If we never return to the place we started, we would just be wandering, lost. Home is a reflecting surface, a place to measure our growth and enrich us after being infused with the outside world.
