I decided early on that I wanted to participate in the greater American experience, rather than the parochial one in Mississippi. But I have an urge as a writer to meld the Southern experience into the larger American one.
I've had the good fortune of teaching and preaching across much of the globe, while also struggling to make sense of my experience in my own tiny world.
Truth be told, I'm not an easy man. I can be an entertaining one, though it's been my experience that most people don't want to be entertained. They want to be comforted.
Any writer who gives a reader a pleasurable experience is doing every other writer a favor because it will make the reader want to read other books. I am all for it.
The thing is, the Tulsa experience that I wrote about in 'The Outsiders' is closer to the universal experience than it would be if I wrote it from L.A. or New York. It's an everyman story.
My poems - I don't even like the sound of that, in a way. Not that anyone else wrote them. But we know that only people who are really close to us care about our personal experience.
I think on-stage nudity is disgusting, shameful and damaging to all things American. But if I were 22 with a great body, it would be artistic, tasteful, patriotic and a progressive religious experience.
I want you, as a reader, to experience what I experience, to let that other world, that imaginary world that I have created, tell you things about the real world.
My experience in Amsterdam is that cyclists ride where the hell they like and aim in a state of rage at all pedestrians while ringing their bell loudly, the concept of avoiding people being foreign to them.
Beliefs have the power to create and the power to destroy. Human beings have the awesome ability to take any experience of their lives and create a meaning that disempowers them or one that can literally save their lives.
Acting is not a mystery. There's nothing that I know that other actors don't know. We all act, we're all actors, we all know the same thing. The only thing that separates us is experience.
When you go to the movies with your whole family, it's a different experience. For some reason, it's something that you're all doing together and you take away something special in that.
Poetry, I think, intensifies the reader's experience. If it's a humorous facet of the story, poetry makes it more exuberant. If it's a sad facet, poetry can make it more poignant.
Before people complain of the obscurity of modern poetry, they should first examine their consciences and ask themselves with how many people and on how many occasions they have genuinely and profoundly shared some experience with another.
At first sight experience seems to bury us under a flood of external objects, pressing upon us with a sharp and importunate reality, calling us out of ourselves in a thousand forms of action.
A lot of people seem to feel that joy is only the most intense version of pleasure, arrived at by the same road - you simply have to go a little further down the track. That has not been my experience.
The case for exploiting animals for food, clothing and entertainment often relies on our superior intelligence, language and self-awareness: the rights of the superior being trump those of the inferior.
None of us is guaranteed against failure or corruption of any kind; witness what's going on in the world in this moment, the follies of human nature and the failures of human nature.
In my family, as in most middle-class Indian families I knew when I was growing up, science and mathematics were held in awe.
A Western woman is not her brother's or her father's property. She's just herself. She can choose her own lifestyle. But in a Muslim family, the honor of the man is between the legs of a woman.
My children grew up with one Western parent. My husband doesn't believe in raising his voice with the kids and we don't spank. They were really raised in a half-Asian family.
