When I'm home on a break, I lock myself in my room and play guitar. After two or three hours, I start getting into this total meditation. It's a feeling few people experience, and that's usually when I come up with weird stuff. It just flows. I can't...
Growing up in Britain as a rather loose Jew, the two things that didn't belong together were freedom and religious intensity. In America, they do. The Founding Fathers made a bet that if you didn't force everyone to profess religion in their own part...
I always just wanted to write and maybe direct. I'm really only interested in that. And yet the business that I'm in has forced me into being a salesman - that's the last thing that 17-year-old me would imagine I'd end up being. I'm uncomfortable try...
Almost all of my jobs have been on locations. And I think you can be that person who says, 'I have a job that forces me to travel and I'm just going to go ahead and do it and pray for my next flight home.' Or 'this is where I am, this is my life, let...
Seattle's got a great work force, relatively low cost of starting a company, and just a really good, innovative entrepreneurial DNA. To me it's less about Seattle tooting its horn and more about bold, confident, dare-to-be-different entrepreneurs gra...
Many people in Britain will regard the end of combat in Afghanistan as a very good news story, but for many young men and women joining the Armed Forces, the lure of operations is a big recruiting sergeant, and we have to think how we are going to re...
In 1967, I signed up for the Army, where I earned an equivalency diploma, then went on to join the Special Forces. That was really was the turning point in my life. I became more disciplined and focused. I went overseas and was in combat, got wounded...
Today we often think that before we start living a religious life we have first to accept the creedal doctrines and that before one can have any comprehension of the loyalty and trust of faith, one must first force one's mind to accept a host of inco...
God wants to help us... He loves us... we are His children. But He will not force His help on us at any time. He sees us when we struggle and fight and complain our way through things. And I believe it breaks His heart, when all we have to do is ask ...
From my mother I learned just how violent and unquenchable a woman's loneliness can be. She had been sheltered excessively by her husband and then, midway through her life, they divorced, and she was forced to earn her own living. It was as if after ...
I never said I wanted a 'happy' life but an interesting one. From separation and loss, I have learned a lot. I have become strong and resilient, as is the case of almost every human being exposed to life and to the world. We don't even know how stron...
Do you lend books and DVDs to people? If so, don't you always regret it? All my life I have forced books on to people who have subsequently forgotten all about it. Meanwhile, on my shelves sit many orphaned books loaned to me over the years by trusti...
I'm so excited. I love Peeta so much. I think that over the course of the next couple of books, he has so many interesting places to go to, character-wise. I'm ready to dive full-force into it. When I saw the movie actually, it got me energized. 'Let...
A wiser intelligence might now truthfully say of us at this point: here is a chimera, a new and very odd species come shambling into our universe, a mix of Stone Age emotion, medieval self-image, and godlike technology. The combination makes the spec...
At some thoughts one stands perplexed - especially at the sight of men's sin - and wonders whether one should use force or humble love. Always decide to use humble love. If you resolve on that, once and for all, you may subdue the whole world. Loving...
There's a certain cruelty to being on a big screen as your eyelids start to sag and your hair falls out and turns gray that you either have to be able to handle or not. What you can't do is try to force yourself into roles that you could have played ...
The Civilized… murder their children by producing too many of them without being able to provide for their well-being. Morality or theories of false virtue stimulate them to manufacture cannon fodder, anthills of conscripts who are forced to sell t...
Spiritual fulfillment doesn't have to mean belief in a religion or disbelief in science. ... Whether one believes in an unseen, all-knowing force, or the wonder of science and the universe, or simply the beauty of the human spirit, nearly every one o...
Since we replaced the compulsory military draft with an all-volunteer force in 1973, our nation has been making decisions about wars without worry over who fights them. I sincerely believe that reinstating the draft would compel the American public t...
When I was a bad writer, I would consciously imitate other NPR writers who I thought were wonderful. I suppose that everyone's artistic practice is different. But I collaborate and sometimes don't agree at all with my collaborators' opinions. It forc...
I do read a lot, and I think in recent years the ratio between the amount of non-fiction and fiction has tipped quite considerably. I did read fiction as a teenager as well, mostly because I was forced to read fiction, of course, to go through high s...
