But once you've made a song and you put it out there, you don't own it anymore. The public own it. It's their song. It might be their song that they wake up to, or their song they have a shower to, or their song that they drive home to or their song ...
I usually write about ordinary people and ordinary things, but Paul Farmer is the least ordinary person I've ever met... He's the leader of a small group of people who hope to cure a sick world, and I hope my book can help in some small way.
The whole experience co-curating the Biennial was a learning experience. The Suburban and The Poor Farm are not institutions. They are not by design, organized around power structures. Because I am someone who thrives on delineating context, seeing u...
Paul Robeson was an athlete, Rutgers valedictorian, lawyer, writer, actor in movies and plays, great voice - a black male doing it all, back when some people thought he shouldn't. One reason I do all the things I do is to break stereotypes that peopl...
I think of talent as being God-given. I know that contradicts what a lot of people believe, but that's how I see it. I think the Beatles were meant to be, you know? So when I listen to Paul McCartney, I think, 'Here's the person that God gave the gif...
Horror. I can't manage it. I become--well--horrified. Self-help books have a similar effect. When asked, "Any literary genre you simply can't be bothered with?" - (By the Book: Writers on Literature and the Literary Life from the NYT Book Review, by ...
I tended to lean towards the guys who both sang and played, such as Ricky Skaggs, Vince Gill, Steve Wariner... And at the other end of the spectrum, I had Eric Clapton in a rock and blues sense, jazz guys such as Tal Farlow and Les Paul... Then Chet ...
A NASA-funded study estimates that if the price of a ticket to space approached $100,000, close to a million people would buy one. That's a $100 billion industry. Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen gave me $20 million in startup funding to go after that ...
Most of my ukulele heroes were traditional players from Hawaii, like Eddie Kamae and Ohta-san. There may not be uke stars in popular culture, but there are certainly pop stars that play uke - George Harrison, Eddie Vedder, Taylor Swift, Train, and Pa...
This is not about Republican or Democrat. It is about our children, it's about our families, it is about our country, and frankly, ladies and gentlemen, it is about the world. We've got to leave here and march, and make sure Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan...
I have some friends who have been living in the political world for some time now. It's a lot of robbing Peter to pay Paul. If you've got something you want, and that person who has it wants something in return, it quite literally becomes your job to...
Paul Edgecomb: What did you just do to me? John Coffey: I helped it. Didn't I help it? I just took it back, is all. Awful tired now, boss. Dog tired.
Dave Kujan: You know a dealer named Ruby Deamer, Verbal? Verbal: You know a religious guy named John Paul? Dave Kujan: You know Ruby's in Attica? Verbal: He didn't have my lawyer.
If there was one fact that sent me hurtling off to write 'Politics Lost,' it was when I learned that John Kerry had focus-grouped Abu Ghraib. We knew about the Justice Department memo in June of 2004, and Kerry didn't raise that in any one of his thr...
With the Truman book, I wrote the entire account of his experiences in World War I before going over to Europe to follow his tracks in the war. When I got there, there was a certain satisfaction in finding I had it right - it does look like that.
The Christian's whole desire, at its best and highest, is that Jesus Christ be praised. It is always a wretched bastardization of our goals when we want to win glory for ourselves instead of for him.
Lucy seemed to be imprisoned by a legion of people in her life who always wanted what was right for her. And as a result, in the eyes of everyone, she had everything... and yet she always, always felt she had nothing. No one.
You can see the whole entire world in the eyes of a person who knows how to simply stand there and take all of it into him but then you can look into the eyes of someone else and the whole entire world goes away and all that's left is you.
The small smiles everybody wanted to try to figure out – they meant nothing, really. She wasn't so good at talking and the smiles made up for it. They filled the spaces in which she ought to have answers for things with something that gave people m...
Such excessive preoccupation with his faults is not a truly spiritual activity but, on the contrary, a highly egoistic one.The recognition of his own faults should make a man humbler, when it is beneficial, not prouder, which the thought that he ough...
If outer events bring him to a position where he can bear them no longer and force him to cry out to the higher power in helplessness for relief, or if inner feelings bring humiliation and recognition of his dependence on that power, this crushing of...