Consciously or not, we are all on a quest for answers, trying to learn the lessons of life. We grapple with fear and guilt. We search for meaning, love, and power. We try to understand fear, loss, and time. We seek to discover who we are and how we c...
I've learned that fear limits you and your vision. It serves as blinders to what may be just a few steps down the road for you. The journey is valuable, but believing in your talents, your abilities, and your self-worth can empower you to walk down a...
Edgar Degas's famous sculpture, 'Little Dancer Aged Fourteen,' served as my muse for 'The Painted Girls.' I came upon a television documentary on the work, and as someone who held the sculpture in high esteem and who largely considered ballet to be t...
One of the things that has really hit home for me is that the world is how we decide it is going to be. Very few things just happen. They grow out of history, and they grow out of the present, and the more we can get a sense of how our actions lead i...
I don't think I can do anything. I mean, I felt I had been given a bit of a gift and a key to a kind of a future. But I've always felt there is more that I can learn and that there are many people who are as good as, or better at, what I do than I am...
If, like Harry Keogh, I could talk to the dead - God, there are an awful lot of people I would like to speak to! Not least my father. Being in the army for 22 years, I didn't see enough of him, and I know there are a great many things I could have le...
If a reviewer is beating me up, I just say, 'Oh well, my writing is not to his or her taste.' And that's as far as it goes. Because I will simultaneously read a review where somebody says, 'Oh my God, I had so much fun reading this book and I learned...
My mother was really young when she had me, so she was a horrible cook, but we lived with my grandmother, who was fantastic. We eventually got our own place, and my mother started learning to cook. But it was also the '70s, so she was very experiment...
I'm most proud of the blessings that God has bestowed upon me, in my life. He's given me the vision to truly see that you can fall down, but you can still get back up. Hopefully I'll learn from my mistakes and have the opportunity to strengthen and i...
A human being has so many skins inside, covering the depths of the heart. We know so many things, but we don't know ourselves! Why, thirty or forty skins or hides, as thick and hard as an ox's or bear's, cover the soul. Go into your own ground and le...
I'm hungry for knowledge. The whole thing is to learn every day, to get brighter and brighter. That's what this world is about. You look at someone like Gandhi, and he glowed. Martin Luther King glowed. Muhammad Ali glows. I think that's from being b...
There is this tremendous body of knowledge in the world of academia where extraordinary numbers of incredibly thoughtful people have taken the time to examine on a really profound level the way we live our lives and who we are and where we've been. T...
I learned early on that one of the secrets of campus leadership was the simplest thing of all: speak to people coming down the sidewalk before they speak to you. I would always look ahead and speak to the person coming toward me. If I knew them I wou...
I started to learn Greek when I was in high school, the last year of high school, by accident, because my teacher knew Greek and she offered to teach me on the lunch hour, so we did it in an informal way, and then I did it at university, and that was...
I learned to canoe at summer camp and thought I'd pursue Olympic whitewater canoeing. In my senior year of high school, I instead decided to attend M.I.T. I like to say I've had only two jobs in my life: whitewater canoeing instructor and wilderness ...
What I wanted to do and what I needed to do was something entirely different, and through reading Roussel I learned that I could do what I wanted all on my own and that I didn't have to rely on what had actually happened in my somewhat limited life a...
No, don't learn at karate schools. They overcharge you for karate uniforms. They make you pay, like, fifty or seventy-five bucks just for a karate uniform, and you don't wear a uniform in everyday life, so why train in one? Most fights take place out...
I am playing with the assumptions that we have in our everyday life when we are tripped up or fooled and we learn something, that makes things exciting - I am having fun with that stuff, but you have to manage it so it doesn't get too cute, that's wh...
I'm growing up and continuing to learn from my mistakes and trying not to make the same ones over and over again, but am I going to live in a shell, or am I just going to hide from everybody and not do anything? I don't think that's the way I should ...
When I was younger, I thought I had to shut myself off, work really hard to cry. I learned after a while that that's just not... You know, often in life, you cry when you're caught off-guard. That's where I need to be when I'm acting, too.
I started out as a lawyer and came in laterally to Goldman Sachs. So I learned myself that life is unpredictable. That you really should, in terms of your career, try to be excellent at what you're doing. I think if you focus on your job, and you foc...
