I live with one foot in the sand and one in the snow. There's European egocentricity, and the African opposite. I normally say that my African experience has made me a better European.
We sell tea in Starbucks, but I think the experience is very different. I think coffee is something that is quick - it's transactional. I think tea is more Zen-like. It requires a different environment.
Post-9/11, we saw an immediate uptick in the amount of people in our stores, all over the country. People wanted that human connection. We are not going to fracture the Starbucks experience.
The fact that I am a writer comes from the experience of being cut away from my roots and living in Venezuela, where I couldn't find a place for myself, for years and years.
The boarding-school experience in Paris was very hard, I didn't put up with it very well. I was sick all the time, or in any case frail, on the edge of a nervous breakdown.
People are always fascinated by infidelity because, in the end - whether we've had direct experience or not - there's part of you that knows there's absolutely no more piercing betrayal. People are undone by it.
And with each day that passed, the gulf broadened and my isolation became more accentuated. In such a situation, the discovery that my experience was not unique, that it had also been that of other Spanish intellectuals, became very important for me.
Indeed, if a chief question does remain: how is the power to think possible? - The power to think right and left, before and without, with and above experience? then it does not take a deduction to prove the genealogical priority of language.
If you will call your troubles experiences, and remember that every experience develops some latent force within you, you will grow vigorous and happy, however adverse your circumstances may seem to be.
I've learned through experience of playing different characters, some of whom were jerks, that when you play a character who is pretentious or obnoxious, in any way, it's important to knock them down a peg.
My experience tells me, unfortunately, that so many people ask the question about 'The Smiths' reforming without really caring about the answer. They just really want to ask the question.
The act of writing... is the act of trying to understand why my opinion is what it is. And ultimately, I think that's the same experience the reader has when they pick up one of my books.
That this individual life of all of us is not something limited in its temporal expression to the life that now we experience, follows from the very fact that here nothing final or individual is found expressed.
When a novel has 200,000 words, then it is possible for the reader to experience 200,000 delights, and to turn back to the first page of the book and experience them all over again, perhaps more intensely.
Though 'Fire and Rain' is very personal, for other people it resonates as a sort of commonly held experience... And that's what happens with me. I write things for personal reasons, and then in some cases it... can be a shared experience.
I feel that the Christian experience and the Jewish one have much to give each other. If this open society continues and there is no return to political anti-Semitism, then this encounter, deeper than any theology, may happen.
The truth is that our unconscious minds are active, purposeful, and independent. Hidden they may be, but their effects are anything but, for they play a critical role in shaping the way our conscious minds experience and respond to the world.
Film is such a bizarre vehicle for acting. It's such a bizarre experience. I don't think you ever really get familiar with it. If you do get familiar with it, you're probably not that good anymore.
I have learned that a bitter experience can make you stronger. I now boastfully say that I have a hide like a rhinoceros... and I'm smiling. It's an interesting thing.
Another way of judging the value of a prophet's religious experience, therefore, would be to examine the type of manhood that he has created, and the cultural world that has sprung out of the spirit of his message.
I hold that the propositions embodied in natural science are not derived by any definite rule from the data of experience, and that they can neither be verified nor falsified by experience according to any definite rule.
