The Bible is big in my teaching. It's a wonder the ACLU didn't get after me pretty good. I really kept thinking they would. I took my boys to church. I took my football team to church. I only did it two times a year. Before I signed a kid, I'd write ...
I do all I can to maintain good health. I eat mostly plants, as Michael Pollan would say. I get a lot of exercise. I lead a purposeful daily life. I stay current with the dentist. I made the formative decision of where to live over thirty years ago w...
I've had experiences in my life that leave no doubt in my mind about the fact that God exists. I'm quite willing to debate people who don't think so because I want them to explain to me how did our solar system get so organized and how is the univers...
I had to come out to my mother three times over a twelve-year period, but I first came out to her when I was sixteen. It didn't go over so well, because I grew up in the Pentecostal Church. It was a very strict environment. She has since done a lot o...
When I wrote my first book, 'The Tennis Party', my overriding concern was that I didn't write the autobiographical first novel. I was so, so determined not to write about a 24-year-old journalist. It was going to have male characters, and middle-aged...
Time does not bring relief; you all have lied … But last year’s bitter loving must remain … There are a hundred places where I fear to go — so with his memory they brim. And entering with relief some quiet place Where never fell his foot or s...
each year, she finds her friendships less volatile and easier, because she increasingly succeeds at looking past their flaws and disappointments and homing in on their pleasures and on what set them in motion to begin with. And she wonders why she di...
Years ago atheism was an individual phenomenon; today atheism is social, the atheist who once was a curiosity, is now a component part of some of the governments of the world. Once men quarreled because they wanted God worshipped in a certain way; no...
I should have paid greater attention to my mentor in graduate school, Samuel Huntington, who once explained that Americans never recognize that, in the developing world, the key is not the kind of government — communist, capitalist, democratic, dic...
At times I am incline that I've wasted my years. I feel I ought to have been exceptional than what I am presently. Furthermore, at whatever time I think about this, anger rise up within me. Listen! It is possible to look angry, be irate with yourself...
When I was 15 years old, my cousin and I formed a singing group called The Altaires. And, because we became the most popular singing group in the Tri-State area, the rest of the group convinced me I should play the guitar - even though I didn't own o...
Many times, you are the single most significant and glorious thing that has ever happened in the lives of some people; they sit around and talk about you over and over again throughout the years while you are out there living your life, every step th...
It’s the hard things that break; soft things don’t break. It was an epiphany I had today and I just wonder why it took me so very, very long to see it! You can waste so many years of your life trying to become something hard in order not to break...
They get quieter over the years. They still whisper to you sometimes, but the world gets louder. You can see it and hear it again. There's a gap in it, where they used to be. But you get used to the gap; so used to it that you can hardly see it. And ...
Years later, my wife, Ilusion, woke me up to the realization that you can't just "dump" your whole species simply because you've had a few bad encounters with some of its members. ... Intimacy's a greater goal to seek. ...That true knowledge of intim...
I hate Risk. I have for many years now. I hate that you still like Risk. I hate that you guilt me into playing with you because no one else will. I hate that you do the accents of the countries you’re attacking from. And I hate that you wear a bere...
Religion is the most powerful entity on earth. A phenomenon that has conscripted millions to give or sacrifice their lives without so much as a minuscule query about their chosen beliefs or particular ideology. And today thousands of years on despite...
No beating yourself up. That’s not allowed. Be patient with yourself. It took you years to form the bad habits of thought that you no longer want. It will take a little time to form new and better ones. But I promise you this: Even a slight move in...
People have come to me over the years and said to me: 'I admire the culture of Starbucks. Can you come give a speech and help us turn our culture around?' I wish it were that easy. Turning a culture around is very difficult to do because it's based o...
No one would have believe in the last years of the nineteenth century we were being scrutinised like a scientist looks through his microscope at transient beings that swarm and multiply in a drop of water. And yet from the gulf of space minds immesur...
What kind of woman tells all her secrets?” my mother continued, flabbergasted and disappointed in me. “Especially anything that has to do with your body making babies! I know a woman who had no ovaries when she got married. Her husband found out ...
