When people evaluate their life, they compare themselves to a standard of what a successful life is, and it turns out that standard tends to be universal: People in Togo and Denmark have the same idea of what a good life is, and a lot of that has to ...
Relative to most of the energy and material flows on Earth, the machinations of humankind are puny. The planet's powers are much, much bigger than our own. But in a few sensitive places, we're making an impact on a planetary scale, and that impact is...
People spend time worrying about things they think they have to have and lose perception of what they do have. You can have all the money and material things you want. If you aren't here to enjoy them, what good do they do?
The hardest thing to write was explaining what anxiety feels like. Every time I'd try to really write about what it feels like to have an anxiety attack, I would actually have an anxiety attack. It was good material but so incredibly uncomfortable.
Even when you're producing difficult material and you get emotional, after it you feel good; you feel like you've done a good job, or had an emotional release. I've always enjoyed that, but you go home and think, that was a good day's work, and you m...
When you're coming up with new material, it's not always gonna be good. The only way to learn is for it not to get a laugh, so you can adjust it and come back the next day to see if it's working right. Next time, you might get a different laugh. You'...
I think that, for physicians who want to become writers, they have the material, the smarts, they have the logic, they know the stories; it's just a matter of being able to connect with their emotional sides - that's the key to writing good fiction.
The 'New Testament', now, I quite liked. Jesus had a lot of good things to say, and as for his father, he must have been highly thought of by the community to work with wood - a material that couldn't have been widely available in Palestine.
Most Muslim women know it is fear and curiosity that cause people to stare. They know it is ignorance and stereotypes that cause people to suppose that a piece of material covering the hair strips a woman of the ability to speak English, pursue a car...
I play these sort of comical instruments I invented, like the electric rake and the electric plunger. I do a lot of almost stand-up comedy material. Just the juxtaposition of the different styles in itself sometimes is funny. Like, I do sort of an ac...
If you tell God no because He won't explain the reason He wants you to do something, you are actually hindering His blessing. But when you say yes to Him, all of heaven opens to pour out His goodness and reward your obedience. What matters more than ...
Almost all wars, perhaps all, are trade wars connected with some material interest. They are always disguised as sacred wars, made in the name of God, or civilization or progress. But all of them, or almost all of the wars, have been trade wars.
The source of all the material comes from nothingness, illusion is working more on things you can prove. That's the principle, the essence of life, it is actually an illusion, not immaterial. That's worth pursuing. So illusion is not nothing. In a wa...
When I was a kid, I knew the black and white version of 'Jane Eyre,' and I guess I became interested in the idea of romantic love - of unrequited love and the tragedies of that; of what are the important things in life; what should one value over oth...
All novels must be autobiographical because I am the only material that I know. All of the characters are me. But at the same time, a novel is never autobiographical even if it describes the life of the author. Literary writing is a completely differ...
I have no sense of a model or predecessor when I write a memoir: For me, the form exists as a method of processing material that retains too many connections to life to be approached strictly and aesthetically. A memoir is a risk, a one-off, a bastar...
The danger for a comedian on Twitter is the same danger that any civilian faces: sometimes you gotta put that phone down and go live your life. When you're on Twitter, you're not living, and if you're not living, you're not taking in stimuli with whi...
Each time you go to the grocery store with your kids, it is a potential learning opportunity. In order not to overemphasize materialism, focus on other things to do with money. In 'Beyond the Lemonade Stand,' I try to emphasize the importance of savi...
My first book, 'Fast Forward', was about growing up in the shadow of Hollywood and how kids are affected by the culture of materialism and the cult of celebrity, and I've often felt the reason my work has an audience in the U.K. is because it's every...
When I do a novel, I don't really use the script, I use the book; when I did Apocalypse Now, I used Heart of Darkness. Novels usually have so much rich material.
Stanley Kubrick was a big inspiration. People accuse me of never using my own material. But when did Kubrick? You look at his films and they are completely unique... completely separate entities.
