I like the rhythm of comedy in dramas, if that makes sense. In other words, I don't want to write setup, punch, setup, punch, where the joke dictates the scene; I want to find comedy in which the drama is actually driving the moment in the scene.
For the poet is a light and winged and holy thing, and there is no invention in him until he has been inspired and is out of his senses, and the mind is no longer in him: when he has not attained to this state, he is powerless and is unable to utter ...
Giving consumers the choice of having it all in one big bite means different viewers are in many different places in the book, making it hard to discuss without spoiling the plot. The intervals between first-run programming provide a space for commun...
A part of the placidity of the South comes from the sense of well-being that follows the heart-and-body-warming consumption of breads fresh from the oven. We serve cold baker's bread to our enemies, trusting that they will never impose on our hospita...
I make lists to keep my anxiety level down. If I write down 15 things to be done, I lose that vague, nagging sense that there are an overwhelming number of things to be done, all of which are on the brink of being forgotten.
There's an overwhelming sense of paranoia in the suburbs. People there seem so much more paranoid to me than people in the city about their kids being kidnapped or their parties being raided or their drinks being spiked. There's a kind of hysteria ab...
I came in with the intention of serving as long as it made sense for me to do so. The election was a natural moment to think about whether I wanted to stay longer, and I'm thrilled to turn the reins over to my longtime colleague Elisse Walter.
Cultures produce myths because they satisfy a deep-rooted human need: the need to make sense of life. Myths are appealing because they reduce the complexity of experience, by making things seem simple and absolute; myths define popular realities whic...
All the analysis of infinite reality which the finite human mind can conduct rests on the tacit assumption that only a finite portion of this reality constitutes the object of scientific investigation, and that only it is 'important' in the sense of ...
Facebook is inherently viral. There are lots of sites that include a contact importer, and for lots of them it doesn't really make sense. For Facebook it fits so well. It wasn't until a few years in that we started building some tools that made it ea...
Relate to a life situation in the deepest sense: not from the standpoint of the ego that bemoans its fate and rebels against it, but from... the greater inner law that has left behind its small birth, the narrow realm of personal outlook, for the sak...
I found my place when I moved to London, where I chose to live, making my own tribe who were all from different backgrounds and places. The class thing is very dominant there, but in the cultural cross-fertilization, I felt a sense of belonging.
I'm not sure why working at a homeless shelter made sense to me, except that I needed to immerse myself in some sort of larger real-life situation to get me out of the cage of my mind, in some ways.
I believe that stories are incredibly important, possibly in ways we don't understand, in allowing us to make sense of our lives, in allowing us to escape our lives, in giving us empathy and in creating the world that we live in.
The reason I like tracking shots has to do more with a sense of real time than anything else. In 'Gravity,' the use of tracking - of long extended takes - was partially because we wanted to film it like an IMAX-style Discovery Channel documentary. Yo...
Even two of humanity's most intimate possessions - a sense of self and a body image - are fluid, highly modifiable creations of the brain's mischievous deployment of electricity and a handful of chemicals. They both can change or be changed on less t...
A lot of parents today are terrified that something they say to their children might make them 'feel bad.' But, hey, if they've done something wrong, they should feel bad. Kids with a sense of responsibility, not entitlement, who know when to experie...
Perhaps the more benign and poetic sense of God is established when we are babies in the moments of primal joy we might call 'the epiphanies of infancy' - the sensation of being blissfully held and feeling complete and at one with everything - yet ha...
One of the things I'm trying to do over and over again in my books is create new mythologies, create new ways to understand the complexity of the world. I think what mythology does is impress upon chaotic experience the patterns, hierarchies and shap...
I find myself unable to let go of the sense that human beings are somehow special, and that moment-to-moment human experience contains a certain unquantifiable essence. I still suspect there is something too quirky, too paradoxical, or too interperso...
It makes sense that we came up with our public school system during the Industrial Revolution because it's like everybody is a factory worker, eating their terrible food and going back to the room where you're silent and listening to an idiot. That's...
