Teenagers are complicated and at times stubborn, yes, but we are not dumb. We see the world in a different light than the rest do, and sometimes, we’re misunderstood because of it. And that’s alright. That must be the definition of ‘human being...
The problem with a popular art form is that those who want something more are in a hopeless minority compared with the millions who are always seeing it for the first time, or for the reassurance and gratification of seeing the conventions fulfilled ...
Very occasionally, a simplified form of communion and of adult baptism for new members of the church would be enacted but no Separatist was ever married in church, because there is no hint of a marriage ceremony in scripture and the primitive church ...
Out of the corner of his eye Gatsby saw that the blocks of the sidewalks really formed a ladder and mounted to a secret place above the trees—he could climb to it, if he climbed alone, and once there he could suck on the pap of life, gulp down the ...
Suicide is a form of murder - premeditated murder. It isn't something you do the first time you think of doing it. It takes getting used to. And you need the means, the opportunity, the motive. A successful suicide demands good organization and a coo...
Unless you're in an early seventies-era Eagles cover band, a founding member of a religious cult, or sleeping under a bridge in Seattle, lose the beard and get a haircut. Power doesn't have time for any form of hirsute hipster self expression.
To judge a man means nothing other than to ask: What content does he give to the form of humanity? What concept should we have of humanity if he were its only representative?
The very names we use to describe ancient ideas or vanished forms of social organization would be quite meaningless if we had not known living men.
Egg has the truth of it. Aerion's quite the monster. He thinks he’s a dragon in human form, you know. That’s why he was so wroth at that puppet show. A pity he wasn't born a Fossoway, then he’d think himself an apple and we’d all be a deal sa...
I have a totally unhealthy and unrealistic fear of being eaten by a great white shark. This is because I belong to a very specific demographic called American Child Whose Parents Made the Ill-Advised Decision To Allow Her To Watch the Movie Jaws At a...
The soft rush of taxis by him, and laughter, laughters hoarse as a crow's, incessant and loud, with the rumble of the subways underneath - and over all, the revolutions of light, the growings and recedings of light - light dividing like pearls - form...
My theory is that hope is a form of madness. A benevolent one, sure, but madness all the same. Like an irrational superstition--broken mirrors and so forth--hope's not based on any kind of logic, it's just unfettered optimism, grounded in nothing but...
The spiritual things that you may not be able to see and feel are just as real as the things you can. God puts faith in place so you can believe in Him and all things spiritual without have it set before you in physical form.
The Told shone brightly. They truly stood out among the Inhabitants for their life and love, and the power to rebrand words went with them. They employed every type of literary term to form new passages of powerful change, and they rose above the ten...
What [Sarah] Palin so beguilingly represented ... was a form of female power that was utterly digestible to those who had no intellectual or political use for actual women: feminism without the feminists.
We can only guess at the thoughts and emotions of our neighbors. Each one of us is a prisoner in a solitary tower and he communicates with the other prisoners, who form mankind, by conventional signs that have not quite the same meaning for them as f...
At this point in my life - age 24 - I have chosen a fairly strange path that not many are walking. I am a professional spoken word poet who tours the world performing and teaching. I run an organization called Project VOICE dedicated to using this ar...
At age three, if you have a still-growing brain, it's a human behavior. In chimps, by age three, the brain is formed over 90 percent. That's why they can cope with their environment very easily after birth - faster than us, anyway. But in humans, we ...
I feel very strongly influenced by long-form box-set TV drama... I feel really excited that, at last, the novel has found its on-screen equivalent, because the emotional arcs and changes that you can follow are just so much more like a novel, and so ...
Films for TV have to be much closer to the book, mainly because the objective with a TV movie that translates literature is to get the audience, after seeing this version, to pick up the book and read it themselves. My attitude is that TV can never r...
What crushed my soul was hanging out with bitter, desperate comics backstage. They're a different breed than the bitter yet eager psyches in the wings of an improv theatre. Struggling stand-ups have externalized self-loathing into an art form. They'r...
