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...
And I have finally realized that, you know, it's not a given that my lifespan will accommodate my writing aspirations. It could be that it would take me 12 more books at six years each to get it - which means I would have to live to be 126. Which I f...
It’s now clear that many of our most sophisticated abilities are made possible not by specialist brain areas dedicated to specific tasks, but by lightning-fast coordination between areas that control more general tasks, such as movement and hearing...
THE EMPRESS LO was not beautiful but she was ambitious and, sometimes, ambition can take you further than beauty. The women of the court never wondered how she got this far because as all women know, the rise to power is relatively simple ~ especiall...
To see poor people, their benefits being cut, to see pensions of Americans who have worked like my father, all their lives, and taken away, to see the rich just accumulating more and more wealth. I mean, it seems to me that there has to be a point wh...
You'll never fly, if you're too scared of the height, You'll never live if you're just too scared to die, Everybody wants heaven, I know But darling freedom ain't free, it's a long road You'll never find your place up there in the sky If you never sa...
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...
So, what does it take to live a more excellent life? It takes a new way of thinking, speaking and acting. It takes a change in habits, and a better understanding of who you are and what you do each day. It takes a foolproof formula you can apply to e...
Just look at the track record of these giveaway programs," I protested. "Broken mills, lower production levels of rice after 20 years of work and money. This can't be right...the only way this will work for the farmers is if they own it themselves, i...
Living's immediacy, you go full sail, you're in a fever of motion. Until it's safe and past and done and dead and you can say, like waking from a dream, "Yes I was happy then, yes now it's all over I can see I was happy then." Maybe that's the advant...
As I detail in my new book: 'Hard Measures, How Aggressive CIA Actions After 9/11 Saved American Lives,' there are many myths surrounding the detention of a relatively small number of top terrorists at CIA-run 'black sites' from 2002 until they were ...
A worldview is a commitment, a fundamental orientation of the heart, that can be expressed as a story or in a set of presuppositions (assumptions which may be true, partially true or entirely false) which we hold (consciously or subconsciously, consi...
No one is perfect. Sometimes, it is the imperfections that make us more alive than those around us. It’s the happiness of truly breathing and living in freedom of ourselves. Even though we may look broken to the world, there is always someone who s...
As a child, I lived with being punier than other boys in class. The only consolation was my parents' empathy - they encouraged constant trips to the local drugstore for chocolate milk shakes to fatten me up. The shakes made me happy, but still, all t...
I wanted to make comics that get at feelings that connect to the deepest moments of our lives, reading Tolstoy, Flaubert, Flannery O'Connor, Herman Melville, William Faulkner, Vladimir Nabokov and Carver to help gain the confidence to figure it out. ...
It is a long journey, not just as a writer, but as a human being. Take nothing and no one for granted, be humble always, be kind especially when it's difficult and never forget the place where you came from and the people that helped you get where yo...
The very fact that we need to struggle for approval proves that we do not approve of ourselves. Having to convince ourselves of something means we do not really believe it. That is why we contort ourselves grotesquely, lose sight of who we really are...
I'd like to see the giant squid. Nobody has ever seen one. I could tell you people who have spent thousands and thousands of pounds trying to see giant squid. I mean, we know they exist because we have seen dead ones. But I have never seen a living o...
I think I was a shy kid. I grew up without television. I had a dog, and we lived up in the White Mountains in the summer, and I had no friends up there. And I would just go play hide-and-seek with my dog and probably had some imaginary friends.
And once again, work is providing us with a comforting sense of normalcy-living and working inside of coding's predictably segmented time/space. Simply grinding away at something makes life feel stable, even though the external particulars of life (l...
I have an unconscious burglar living in my mind: If I read something, it's mine. I can read Middle English stories, Geoffrey Chaucer or Sir Thomas Malory, but once I start moving in the direction of contemporary fantasy, my mind begins to take over.
