No original thought still exists. People are original, each one of them. The same ideas that others had before you are waiting for you to bring them back to life in a new way. The part of who you are that is left behind within these old ideas is what...
Your problem is how you are going to spend this one and precious life you have been issued. Whether you're going to spend it trying to look good and creating the illusion that you have power over circumstances, or whether you are going to taste it, e...
Often we allow ourselves to be upset by small things we should despise and forget. We lose many irreplaceable hours brooding over grievances that, in a year's time, will be forgotten by us and by everybody. No, let us devote our life to worthwhile ac...
The merciful Providence - or whatever power there is in the universe - has so ordained things that our little world will go on without us. Indeed, it will not miss us for long. It is a comfort to know that the waters close over us quickly. Only a few...
My junior year, I went to an LSAT-prep course. I flipped over my test and thought, 'You bastards.' I walked out and went to Waffle House. That's where I had what I call 'The Waffle House Epiphany': I didn't want to be a lawyer. I wanted to make a den...
I was just walking around saying “We’re all gonna die!” I never got over it. I went to class, I did what I had to do, but I was a gibbering idiot. It never went away. I never again felt the same way about life and death.
When I played Gollum in 'Lord of the Rings,' if I was climbing up the side of a mountain, which I physically did, you know, I was on every single occasion swimming through streams, all of that, that wasn't captured. That was filmed on 35 millimeter, ...
I was just sitting in Target, just getting over my cold. I blew my nose and I see these people looking at me and kind of whispering and pointing. Finally, I went, 'Is everything okay? Did I do something wrong? Do I have a booger on my face and no one...
Those moments before a poem comes, when the heightened awareness comes over you, and you realize a poem is buried there somewhere, you prepare yourself. I run around, you know, kind of skipping around the house, marvelous elation. It’s as though I ...
But when I look at the fact that today is 1,000 days that we have not had a budget for the United States of America, you know, the House, one of the things we did, we passed a budget last year. But that is still sitting over there at the Senate. And ...
I found 'The Twin' sitting on a coffee table at a writers' colony in 2009. It carried praise from J.M. Coetzee. That seemed ample justification for using it to avoid my own writing. I finished it - weeping - a day later, and I've been puzzling over i...
When the 2008 victory of Barack Obama and the defeat of grumpy old John McCain began looking, um, inevitable, I started fielding inquiries about whether 'Nixonland' - the name of the book I published that spring about the origins of the generation of...
Flipping the dial through available radio stations there will blare out to any listener an array of broadcasts, 24/7, propagating Religious Right politics, along with what they deem to be 'old-time gospel preaching.' This is especially true of what c...
I have forty-six cookbooks. I have sixty-eight takeout menus from four restaurants. I have one hundred and sixteen soy sauce packets. I have three hundred and eighty-two dishes, bowls, cups, saucers, mugs and glasses. I eat over the sink. I have five...
Training is the word we use now. To train means to teach a particular skill over a period of time. Every time you get up, show up, work out, you are training yourself to be better, to live happier and healthier. Don’t expect results in a snap. Reme...
The day you give priority to bogus ethics over human reactions, you become a loser. Human reactions are priceless. Rules should never, ever stifle emotions. Tennis is a very human game facing a great danger that it will be strangulated in a cat's cra...
Heaven help us! The girls have only to turn the tables,and say of one of their own sex,'She is as vain as a man,' and they will have perfect reason. The bearded creatures are quite as eager for praise, quite as finikin over their toilets, quite as pr...
Motivation doesn't come from empty words, because words fade over time. If persistance and perservance is what you live then what motivation do you need? Your dreams can turn into goals and your goals can turn into a reality. You are all the motivati...
My prayer time alone with the Lord Jesus is more important than any other thing I do each day. There in the secret place, the devil's plans are shattered and God's victories are won, evil is thwarted and blessings are unleashed, sicknesses are overco...
Have you ever been on a roller coaster, Togawa-kun? You're only riding on it for a few minutes, right? If you spent the entire ride thinking "only so many seconds left... until this ride is over..." then what was the point of riding it in the first p...
You know that feeling you get when you pass by a cop doing like 20 over, when your stomach hits the floor and you get weak in the knees and it seams like time just stops for a min? Thats how i feel every time i see her. I love it.
