Growing up as a kid, I wanted to be a ninja. In martial arts, even though I did Chinese kung fu, I always wanted to be this secret samurai or a ninja. There's something about ninjas that was very appealing to me as a kid. So of course, I was climbing...
I don't hate humanity and I'm not interested in people who do. Although, it's funny, actually, some of my favorite writers really do. Like Martin Amis. My dirty secret. 'London Fields' is one of my favorite books ever. And it's indefensible! But he's...
I learned early on that one of the secrets of campus leadership was the simplest thing of all: speak to people coming down the sidewalk before they speak to you. I would always look ahead and speak to the person coming toward me. If I knew them I wou...
Everybody always asks about Jimmy Fallon. I'm sorry to say that he's very nice and there's not much bad to say about him. I don't know if he sucks at videogames or not. I don't think he plays them, but he could have this whole secret life I don't kno...
There's a time in your life where you're not quite sure where you are. You think everything's perfect, but it's not perfect... Then one day you wake up and you can't quite picture yourself in the situation you're in. But the secret is, if you can pic...
People idealise their animals, and at the same time they patronisingly overlook a dog's natural life - biting fleas, burying bones, rolling in garbage, barking up an empty tree all night... But what do they do themselves? Bury stuff that will rot in ...
The Gospel of Judas really has been a surprise in many ways. For one thing, there's no other text that suggests that Judas Iscariot was an intimate, trusted disciple, one to whom Jesus revealed the secrets of the kingdom, and that conversely, the oth...
A lot of times, when I go back to books I loved when I was young, I don't quite understand what it was that I loved about them. Rereading 'The Secret Garden,' I felt a lot like Mary feels when she visits her garden.
My heart broke a little at her unblemished view of life: She still believed in innocent secrets, the heady rush of a good mystery, and happily ever after... (I wasn't about to disabuse her of those sweet notions.)...Little girls should be allowed to ...
He thought that in the beauty of the world were hid a secret. He thought that the world’s heart beat at some terrible cost and that the world’s pain and its beauty moved in a relationship of diverging equity and that in this headlong deficit the ...
Sometimes I hesitate to use the term sexual abuse. It conjures up worst-case scenarios in our minds, and we think, "That will never happen to my kids." And we never begin the conversation regarding sexual abuse with our children. But one violation le...
In my day, MI6 - which I called the Circus in the books - stank of wartime nostalgia. People were defined by secret cachet: one man did something absolutely extraordinary in Norway; another was the darling of the French Resistance. We didn't even sho...
It is essential that Christians understand this: Every Jew - secular, religious, assimilated, left-wing, right-wing - fears being killed because he is Jewish. This is the best-kept secret about Jews, who are widely perceived as inordinately secure an...
For the first time in memory, I was unable to sleep not because I was anxious but because I was excited. To live in a damp crowded asshole and sing--if these guys don't know the secret to living, I don't know who does. (The Grieving Owl, page 157)
Well the protester I think is a very powerful thing. It's basically a mechanism of democracy that, along with capitalism, scientific innovation, those things have built the modern world. And it's wonderful that the new tools have empowered that prote...
But I'll tell you a secret. When I want to take God at his word exactly I take a peep out the window at His Creation. Because that, darling, He makes fresh for us every day, without a lot of dubious middle managers.
I don't know who said that novelists read the novels of others only to figure out how they are written. I believe it's true. We aren't satisfied with the secrets exposed on the surface of the page: we turn the book around to find the seams.
In the medieval tradition, Beksinski seems to believe art to be a forewarning about the fragility of the flesh– whatever pleasures we know are doomed to perish– thus, his paintings manage to evoke at once the process of decay and the ongoing stru...
At the first kiss I felt something melt inside me that hurt in an exquisite way. All my longings, all my dreams and sweet anguish, All the secrets that slept deep within me came awake, Everything was transformed and enchanted, everything made sense.
You look at Superman, the story of an orphan coming to America, keeping his identity secret and even the names, Kal-El and Jor-El, you can trace lines to the background of the creators, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, both Jewish. Overall, there was a ...
The secret of successfully giving yourself away lies not so much in calculated actions as in cultivating friendly, warm-hearted impulses. You have to train yourself to obey giving impulses on the instant -- before they get a chance to cool. When you ...
