It is not what you say, but how you say it. "Pick that pencil up! -would you mind picking up the pencil? - would you please pick up the pencil?" The way things are said, makes a huge difference in what people think of you. I told my daughter this man...
The ambiance of solitude, the absence of any disturbing noise and of worldly desires and images, the quiet and calm attention of the mind to God, helped by prayer and leisurely reading, flow into that "quies" or "rest" of the soul in God. A simple an...
I'm not slim. I'm a curvy girl: I've got thighs and a bum. I don't mind baring the fact that I've got a bit of cellulite because everybody has. I find it off-putting when everybody on telly is the same size or looks the same build. For me, it's impor...
I write fast. But it takes me a while to get going. It's very important for me to see my whole plot. I have to see the end first because I like a surprise in the end. Which is why I let characters and plot gestate in my mind.
If you were to ask me to pick my favourite author, well, there are so many of them, I'd really just have to say the first names that came to mind, and I'm sure that I'll later think 'Oh, I should have mentioned that one.'
It is necessary to write, if the days are not to slip emptily by. How else, indeed, to clap the net over the butterfly of the moment? For the moment passes, it is forgotten; the mood is gone; life itself is gone. That is where the writer scores over ...
Gert was always of the mind that she wouldn't go to another church except the Catholic Church. So when I would date her in New York City, and later when we went to Oxford before we got married, we always went to the Catholic church.
Faith is the deep want of the soul. We have faculties for the spiritual, as truly as for the outward world. God, the foundation of all existence, may become to the mind the most real of all beings. The believer feels himself resting on an everlasting...
I shall do nothing to discourage my patient, Monseigneur, any more than I shall bleed him, as many good people urge me to do. The mind, too, has a kind of blood; in common speech we call it hope.
I didn't care about that because I'm not a diplomatic person to begin with. I just went along with things and did what I wanted to do because I knew they had to shoot their 12 pages a day. And when they realized that I didn't alter the text they real...
Perfect health, long life and eternal youth are not the random genetic blessings of a chaotic or capricious universe, but natural birthrights that can be accessed through the mindful acceptance of simple truths, activated by the committed practice of...
When we have a favorite writer, it's always the places where they grew up, lived, worked, and that they recreated on the page that we most want to visit and commune with. Faulkner's Mississippi, Raymond Chandler's Los Angeles, etc. The mind of the re...
I started in dance classes when I was, like, seven years old. And the arts in general, it kept me not only off the street, I grew up in South Central Los Angeles, so it kept my mind focused. It kept me passionate about something. So I wasn't easily d...
I believe that a healthy body breeds a healthy mind. I am 74 years old now and my wife, Niso, is 38 years younger than me. She absolutely insists that I take regular exercise with her.
Macbeth does murder sleep - the innocent sleep, Sleep that knits up the ravell'd sleave of care, The death of each day's life, sore labor's bath, Balm of hurt minds, great nature's second course, chief nourisher in life's feast.
When you have children, you realize how easy it is to not see them fully, and perhaps miss all those early years. If you are not careful, you can be too absorbed in work, and they will be only too happy to tell you about it later. Being a parent is o...
I don't know that I 'look up' to them, but in our predictably partisan media world, I admire journalists who are genuinely nonpartisan and totally fearless in their work - people who have no interest in being invited to the cocktail party. I don't ag...
It's very important to go back and keep in mind the distinction between handling these events as criminal acts, which was the way we did before 9/11, and then looking at 9/11 and saying, 'This is not a criminal act,' not when you destroy 16 acres of ...
So I ask the nuclear powers to abandon the out-of-date thinking of the Cold War period and take a fresh look. Above all, I appeal to them to bear in mind the long-term threat that nuclear weapons pose to humankind and to begin action towards their el...
Families are designed to nurture the minds, wills, and emotions of its members so that the barriers created by fear of the unknown can be replaced by the confidence that comes from knowing you are loved whether you succeed or fail.
I don’t naturally look like this. I have to feed in order to have the power to hold it.” “Feed on what exactly?” Please don’t say blood, please don’t say blood, she whispered in her mind. “Death,” Trajan answered. Anya didn’t know i...
