I believe compassion to be one of the few things we can practice that will bring immediate and long-term happiness to our lives. I’m not talking about the short-term gratification of pleasures like sex, drugs or gambling (though I’m not knocking ...
Right before I decided to come out, I went on a spiritual retreat called 'Changing the Inner Dialogue of Your Subconscious Mind.' I'd never been to anything like it before, and all my friends were taking bets on how long I'd last with no TV, no radio...
Larsson was an active and lifelong feminist, partly for personal reasons but also because he saw that ending gender slavery was as crucial to next-stage evolution as ending race slavery was to the last stage. It's a noble fight, not least because the...
I always pray to God that every day when I wake up I'll treat it as if it is the last so that I will spend the rest of my life proving to you how much I love you.
I cried most days working on the first draft. The last scenes were the hardest. I had a feeling where I wanted to end - the exact note - but I couldn't see how to get there. Sarah Murphy, my editor, asked the right questions to help me. I think of 'T...
It is hard to imagine having a government more secretive than the United States. Virtually everything that government does, of any significance, is conducted behind an extreme wall of secrecy. The very few leaks that we’ve had over the last decade ...
I write everything down. I e-mail the second I think of something, or I write notes in my BlackBerry calendar. I set up reminder alerts on my phone. And I have a notebook by my bedside so I can write down any last-minute ideas.
I found the happiest woman in America is between 50 and 55, is happily married, has made significant progress in her career, and lives in a community where she can easily exercise outside. But the most important single thing was she had her last chil...
My father, if anything, first and last, was a man of words. He loved stories; he didn't live for stories, exactly, but I think he lived through stories. I think, like many writers, he loved stories about things he had experienced as much as, if not m...
I'm a professional geologist, an explorationist for oil. That's what I've done in my career, one that's culminated in - at least to this point - playing a part in finding the largest field in the last 40 years anywhere in the world. That's the Bakken...
I think my recognizability ebbs and flows. I don't lead a particularly celebrity lifestyle or anything like that. I don't go to showbiz parties or red-carpet events, so it all depends on whether I've got a film out. I've not been very visible in the ...
If you can live in Vegas, or visit Vegas, and leave in one piece, still loving it and somehow laughing about it, you should spend at least part of your last night in town doing something that will serve you well no matter where you go next: thank you...
Last weekend a young man asked me how I remain so positive. “It seems all the negativity in the world doesn’t affect you,” he said. I had no more than a minute with the young man so I offered this: It’s all about where you choose to put your ...
Put yourself in the position of an up-and-coming artist living in early-sixteenth-century Italy. Now imagine trying to distinguish yourself from the other artists living in your town: Michelangelo, Raphael, Leonardo, or Titian. Is it any wonder that ...
I'm one of the people that were divorced by 30, which is apparently a growing group... Obviously it's something that affects you forever. It's going to be interesting to see in ten, twenty years what kind of lasting effect young divorce has on the pe...
Over the last several years, I've passed defunding Planned Parenthood, the sonogram bill, voter ID. I passed the TSA anti-groping bill, sanctuary cities, loser pay, border security, and the toughest Jessica's law in the entire nation against sexual p...
If you want to put golf back on the front pages again, and you don't have a Bobby Jones or a Francis Ouimet handy, here's what you do: You send an aging Jack Nicklaus out in the last round of the Masters and let him kill more foreigners than a genera...
I kind of got more interested in writing after I turned in my last college essay and nobody was going to tell me what kind of academic papers to write anymore. I could write whatever I wanted, and I realized that I actually liked it when I could choo...
There's just nothing funnier or crazier than that - doing your Broadway debut as Spider-Man in 'Spider-Man' the musical. It was, like, the last thing I could have ever possibly imagined happening. I mean, I would tell people I was playing Spider-Man,...
Ahead now, I think you'll see the big nations shrink back into their own corners of the world. I'm not saying we'll see no international trade, but it will be nothing like the conveyer belt from China to Wal-Mart that we've known the last few decades...
When politicians began to see that every last thing that they did in public could be broadcast to a mass audience, the fact that the stakes were so much higher now that every moment became fraught caused them to become more cautious, and the consulta...
