Random mutations much more easily debilitate genes than improve them, and that this is true even of the helpful mutations. Let me emphasize, our experience with malaria’s effects on humans (arguably our most highly studied genetic system) shows tha...
In the field I’m in, there is a lot of that and it gets offered to me all the time. People even go as far as to just stick it in your pocket and walk off. Now, if it was a good thing, they wouldn’t do that. I mean, would somebody drop something b...
Let me speak plainly: The United States of America is and must remain a nation of openness to people of all beliefs. Our very unity has been strengthened by this pluralism. That's how we began; this is how we must always be. The ideals of our country...
It never occurred to me before, but I always thought of time like it was a road, or an empty plane. I could see it and mark it and claim it as mine, but the reason I couldn't travel my own speed was because I was waiting on the present to catch up, I...
The events of the day overcame me all at once, and I struggled to breathe without crying. As darkness fell over Qalat Sukkar, I sat alone in the dim green light of the radios. I felt sick for the shepherd boys, for the girl in the blue dress, and for...
Start telling the stories that only you can tell, because there’ll always be better writers than you and there’ll always be smarter writers than you. There will always be people who are much better at doing this or doing that - but you are the on...
Church didn't answer that. Instead he said, "The darkness is all around us. Very few people have the courage to light a candle against it." "I'm not that kind of idealist." "Nor am I. We are of a kind, Captain, and neither of us is holding a candle a...
That same night, I wrote my first short story. It took me thirty minutes. It was a dark little tale about a man who found a magic cup and learned that if he wept into the cup, his tears turned into pearls. But even though he had always been poor, he ...
Maybe we shouldn't begin to stop believing in God when He starts to let go of our hand; because at that moment He begins to let go of your hand, that's the moment He's begun to believe in YOU! He says, "I believe in you, I know you can." And that's n...
I think the reason why I don't read so much, is because as I have observed, whole books all boil down to a drop of essence. You can read a book full of ten thousand words and at the end, sum it up in one sentence; I am more for the one sentence. I am...
This American system of ours', he shouted, 'call it Americanism, call it capitalism, call it what you like, gives to each and every one of us a great opportunity if only we seize it with both hands, and make the most of it'. A month later in New York...
Some may see the tortured existence of the musician as one where he's practicing like hell and being alone, I see it quite differently. Having three children, beautiful as it is, burdens you with terrible things often, with strong decision and sleepl...
You know, when I came home after our day in the city, I just crashed, thinking about Remi and how much I missed him. And then the next day was worse, And when you walked up to me at that ice cream machine, I just felt myself crumble inside. Around Re...
But I got through the review, for all their Latin and French; I did, and if you doubt me, you just look at the end of the great ledger, turn it upside down, and you'll find I've copied out all the fine words they said of you: "careful observer," "str...
What is dying? I am standing on the seashore. A ship sails to the morning breeze and starts for the ocean. She is an object and I stand watching her Till at last she fades from the horizon, And someone at my side says, “She is gone!” Gone where? ...
Pegi just recorded "I Don't Want to Talk About," written by Danny Whitten, the original Crazy Horse guitar player and singer who's all over Early Daze, an album of songs from the beginning of Crazy Horse that I have been working on compiling recently...
And then there are always clever people about to promise you that everything will be all right if only you put yourself out a bit... And you get carried away, you suffer so much from the things that exist that you ask for what can't ever exist. Now l...
Borges is particularly stimulating to a man who works in the cinema, because the unusual thing about his writing is that it is like a dream, extraordinarily farsighted in calling up from the unconscious complete images in which the thing itself, and ...
it strikes me that the writers most deeply concerned with the state of literary fiction and its biases against women could do a lot worse than trying to coin some terms of their own: to name the archetypes they wish to invert or criticise and thereby...
Why am I compelled to write?... Because the world I create in the writing compensates for what the real world does not give me. By writing I put order in the world, give it a handle so I can grasp it. I write because life does not appease my appetite...
The reason why the world is a difficult place to live in, is due to the fact that people are not interested in people. Nobody is truly interested in anybody; they are only interested in the parts that they think will be pleasurable and comfortable fo...
