Before I sat down and became a writer, before I began to do it habitually and for my living, there was a decades-long stretch when I was terrified that it would suck, so I didn't write. I think that marks a lot of people, a real terror at being bad a...
Supposedly, the government is in the process of saving us from terrorists. No one has quite figured out who is going to save us from the government. It seems it will have to be us. Part of what we built works great. Part of what we built badly needs ...
After 'The Wonder Years,' I ended up having a voiceover career, which was something I never even knew was possible. But after the character I was playing on 'The Wonder Years,' people said, 'Oh, would you like to do a Burger King thing? And there's a...
When God grabs you by the scruff of the neck then although theoretically you have a freedom to say 'no', in another sense, actually, you can't say no because it's like Jeremiah. 'God, you have cheated me. You called me to be a prophet against the peo...
I know we're not saints or virgins or lunatics; we know all the lust and lavatory jokes, and most of the dirty people; we can catch buses and count our change and cross the roads and talk real sentences. But our innocence goes awfully deep, and our d...
A person is a person through other persons. None of us comes into the world fully formed. We would not know how to think, or walk, or speak, or behave as human beings unless we learned it from other human beings. We need other human beings in order t...
Thank you. It used to be knee length, but then I discovered that when I get angry I like to cut things. I'm not allowed to have scissors any more. It's still pretty lengthy, but I've been threatening to shave half of it for the past week and nobody s...
What are you Tarzan?" he asked aloud. "An ape or a man? If you are an ape, you will do as the apes do - leave one of your kind in the jungle to die if it suited your whim to go elsewhere. If you are a man, you will return to protect your kind. You wi...
Poetry lets me pour out my various emotions even the suppressed ones we didn't know exist inside us' til the moment you start jotting down what you're feeling. It's more than an escape into the unknown, a refuge for your creativity and sometimes wild...
If you can channel the best part of you that is bigger than yourself, where it’s not about your ego and not about getting ahead, then you can have fun and you aren’t jealous of others. You see other people's talent as another branch of your own. ...
Stop confusing yourself and wasting your time doing everything you see or hear from other people. The core is to make time to find your niche, embrace it and run with it before your confusion create envy that will lead to resentment. Wake up! The who...
i don't want to hate the president i don't want to go to harvard i don't want to win the pulitzer prize i just want to sit in my bathtub and think about relationships i will never have with people i will never meet and then go lay in my bed with a ma...
In what way can we reinforce the faith of our biological family when the culture at large is likely to eat away at that faith? Is our prevailing faith contingent upon seeing certain results of a general, cultural repentance -- lest we doubt the truth...
I was an executive running a pretty substantial group before becoming CEO, and I had no idea what it was like. When something goes wrong, people say, 'It's all your fault.' Your reaction is, 'It's not my fault.' But what do you mean? I was the founde...
I think when I start out writing, I always try to write the version of the movie that I want to go see. I don't mean it in a way that ignores the audience, but I really set out to make a movie that I want to see and that, hopefully, other people will...
In the old Republican days the subject of slavery and of the saving of the Union made appeals to the consciences and liberty-loving instincts of the people. These later years have been full of talk about commerce and dinner pails, but I feel sure tha...
Well we're waiting here in Allentown, For the Pennsylvania we never found, For the promises our teachers gave, If we worked hard, If we behaved... So the graduations hang on the wall, But they never really helped us at all, No they never taught us wh...
Mental toughness is the ability to accept the fact that you're human and that you're going to make mistakes-lots of them-all your life. And some of them are gonna hurt people that you love very badly. But you have the guts to accept the fact that you...
Now, as a non-Amish person in the twentieth century who is not a part of the aging and thus noncoveted seventy-five-plus marketing demographic that views things like cell phones and iPads with that quaint, old-people mixture of astonishment, fascinat...
People say, 'Well, whose career do you follow? Where do you see your career going? What movie do you want to do next?' And I can't tell you what type of movie I would go and do next. I would have to read the script and feel for a character. And if I ...
The English language [during the Elizabethan era] wasn't standardized. There were no official dictionaries. There was no cultural belief that words should always be spelled the same way. So people spelled things however they heard them or however mad...
