Bring down Mike Mann and we can bring down the IPCC, they reckoned. It is a classic technique for the deniers' movement, I have discovered, and I don't mean only those who reject the idea of global warming but those who insist that smoking doesn't ca...
It made me alert, like someone had scrubbed mint all over my skin. I'd walk into that stinking, miserable prison and for the next three hours, a wise and beautiful woman would float out of the wreckage of my life, and her words and thoughts and tinie...
When I became a parent and hit my thirties, I got my hands on an acoustic guitar. I started writing quiet, simple songs at home and, with a little encouragement, I got more courage and found my voice. I have people and movements who have inspired me ...
The state of mind of a fighter is so important. I don't like to see a fighter stay locked up in a room. Sometimes it works against them. They think and they worry. They dwell, sitting in that dark room. You come back and they're psyched out. I like t...
A respectable-sized audience hasn't really been able to follow developments in jazz since the free jazz movement in the '60s. Some of them can't even get with John Coltrane. Audiences are diminishing more and more rapidly. Some of the top young music...
Still In the fall, I believe again in poetry if nothing else it is a movement of the mind. Summers ball together into sticky lumps, spring evenings are glass beads from one mould for standard-size youth, winter a smooth heaviness, not even cold. But ...
The wonderful thing about the talking dog collars in 'UP' is that we were able to hear the thoughts of the dogs without moving their mouths or emoting like a human. The dogs could pant, scratch, and move the way dogs truly do. The animators studied t...
Before the Wright brothers flew, flying was fantasy. Before the civil rights movement, people getting along together and the races being equal was a fantasy. Things change because we imagine a different world, a world that is not. And I think that im...
When you see a fish you don't think of its scales, do you? You think of its speed, its floating, flashing body seen through the water... If I made fins and eyes and scales, I would arrest its movement, give a pattern or shape of reality. I want just ...
There's a very passionate pro-chewing movement on the Internet called Chewdiasm. They say that we should be chewing 50 to 100 times per mouthful, which is insane. I tried that. It takes like a day and a half to eat a sandwich. But their basic idea is...
Any government's condemnation of terrorism is only credible if it shows itself to be responsive to persistent, reasonable, closely argued, non-violent dissent. And yet, what's happening is just the opposite. The world over, non-violent resistance mov...
In the society of would-be-gods, a humble man is always polite.
Most poetry in the modern age has retreated to the private sphere, turning its back on the political realm.
The American Right has an amazing ability to lionize leaders whose lives are the precise antithesis of the political values that define their image.
In the heat of our campaigns, we have all become accustomed to a little anger and exaggeration. Yet, on the whole, our political process has served us well.
In the 19th century, you had bourgeois art without politics - an almost frozen idea of what beauty is.
Art requires neither complaisance nor politeness; nothing but faith, faith and freedom.
The art of politics consists in knowing precisely when it is necessary to hit an opponent slightly below the belt.
Politics with me isn't theater. It's performance art. Sometimes, for its own sake.
It's not polite to ask if a man has a big salami in his pants, okay?
A party of order or stability, and a party of progress or reform, are both necessary elements of a healthy state of political life.
