When you blame others, what you are really saying is what is inside of you can’t be fixed, so you have no control of your own happiness. Therefore, you have made the conscience choice to give focus and fuel to a bad situation that will take you now...
Scientists used to do an experiment whereby a dog’s repeated reward for performing a task was unaccountably replaced by punishment. The dog, knowing it would be penalized for doing well or doing badly, would become melancholic and inactive. This an...
Being in front of a camera, in a nice dress, getting all dressed up, is extreme. There's a lot of other extreme situations, you know, just getting out of bed sometimes is extreme - but I do it. Just got to do it, just got to get up. Put your sweatpan...
I could just sit back and get someone to spin my achievements, I suppose, but when I see others do it, I always think, 'Why are you telling me how successful you are?' I am always suspicious of those kinds of boasts.
At the end of each year, I sit on the floor and go page by page through the old calendar, inking annual events into the new one, all the while watching my year in 'dinner withs' skate by. When I'm done, I save the old calendar in the box of the new o...
Humans like to think of themselves as unusual. We've got big brains that make it possible for us to think, and we think that we have free will and that our behavior can't be described by some mechanistic set of theorems or ideas. But even in terms of...
Like many other people of my generation, I don't think I ever really bothered to grow up. I wasn't ever really a proper teenager until I was about 19, and maybe I got a bit stuck there, because it seemed to go on and on.
Human beings have a lot of problems identifying themselves with other human beings who don't resemble them exactly. But there's something about drawing that means that anyone can identify to a drawing. I mean, people can identify themselves with Dona...
The kids today have these fresh faces. It's like they're on pins and needles, waiting to see what I'm going to do. They've never seen me. In the 1960s, those were hippies. They were wired up already. The kids today know me because I've worked with Je...
You can’t control what others think. The only thing you can control is yourself. Some people will look down on you for your choices in life, no matter what they are. You can’t do anything about that. The only thing you can do is decide how to liv...
here’s why I take comedies seriously: they present and celebrate the world in which we survive our own and others’ mistakes, follies, transgressions, and deep sins. However lightly, dimly, or bleakly, comedies revel in our survival—in the delay...
I once volunteered to teach English as a second language, and I thought that I would have all these intense relationships with all these people from other worlds. Then you get there, and it's like, 'This is a pencil. This is a pencil' And afterward, ...
Every year, the United Nations General Assembly votes on a resolution entitled 'Peaceful resolution of the Palestine conflict.' Every year, the vote is the same. The whole world on one side - the whole world on one side - and on the other side, the U...
And by the way I don't object if people want to attack me, that's their right. All I'm suggesting that it's not going to be very effective and that people are going to get sick of it very fast. And the guys who attacked each other in the debates up t...
I try to take a weekly digital Sabbath, batch my emails so I deal with them a few times a day rather than constantly, and increasingly give myself permission to ignore unsolicited communiques. I try, too, to give others more slack. The respond-now cu...
I don't give a darn about coal or about oil. I do give a darn about oil jobs. I do give a darn about the jobs that coal can bring... I am against the Obama administration demonizing certain forms of energy and glorying others. I say, bring it all in.
For today, in the era of globalization and internet, you can't prevent people from communicating with each other. So what about us, Palestinians and Israelis, who are destined to live together on a tiny peace of land, drink from the same water resour...
We are looking to brands for poetry and for spirituality, because we're not getting those things from our communities or from each other. When Nike says, just do it, that's a message of empowerment. Why aren't the rest of us speaking to young people ...
Ishmael was looking at him through narrowed eyes. “This is very important to you, this box.” “It’s important to the world.” Ishmael said: “The sun rises, and the sun sets. Sometimes it rains. We live, then we die.” He shrugged. He would...
I love the way music inside a car makes you feel invisible; if you plan the stereo at max volume, it's almost like the other people can't see into your vehicle. It tints your windows, somehow.
Our lives are led, and our decisions made, within a network of needs and wants, some natural, some arising from the acts of others, some aggravated by the acts of the state. We are all bored, or threatened, or tantalized in differing degrees by a per...
