Both my mother and I have close groups of friends that include other writers, and these friendships are very important to us.
For me, as a beginning novelist, all other living writers form a control group for whom the world is a placebo.
Empathy is a tool for building people into groups, for allowing us to function as more than self-obsessed individuals.
Most philanthropists would still rather donate to elite schools, concert halls or religious groups than help the poor or sick.
I exercise three to four times a week, doing the Tracy Anderson Method, which involves toning and strengthening our small muscle groups.
The truth is we need to build an economy going forward with all of us, when we all move forward and the payment of a national debt is not the responsibility of one group of Americans versus another.
And you cannot have a socialist revolution commandeered from the top, ordered around by some omniscient leader or group of leaders.
Stereotypes lose their power when the world is found to be more complex than the stereotype would suggest. When we learn that individuals do not fit the group stereotype, then it begins to fall apart.
Now if you know what makes one person's life change, then you know what makes a nation change - because a nation is simply a large group of individuals.
The deaf community is in a favorable position because they have a national theatre and training groups of their own to get them started. Deaf actors have often acquired very valuable skills and experience before they get their break.
There's not much to do in Atlanta, so the cast went to the gym together, went shopping together, and dinner was always a group thing. It's that whole summer-camp experience that making movies tends to be anyway.
Second only to a viable approach to acting, the most important thing an actor can find is a creative family. To have a solid core group of people that you take that journey with together is invaluable.
In my own mind, we are a much happier and much more functional family and a much more well balanced group of individual s both off and on the stage - in the current incarnation.
At this level, the individual perceives the maintenance of the expectations of his family, group, or nation as valuable in its own right, regardless of immediate and obvious consequences.
During the 1937 congressional election campaign, Johnson's group probably paid $5,000 to Elliott Roosevelt, one of Franklin Roosevelt's sons, for a telegram in which Elliott suggested that the Roosevelt family favored Lyndon Johnson.
A small house must depend on its grouping with other houses for its beauty, and for the preservation of light air and the maximum of surrounding open space.
Ever since I've been in Congress, various groups on the business side, those entities that are creating jobs out there, have felt that the Clean Air Act is really - that there are all sorts of presumptions in favor of the environmentalists.
From my experience in working with bureaucrats and politicians, if you are a credible business group, they will definitely help you. At the end of the day, they, too, want development of their constituency, state or country.
Record companies would rather you stay dumb, not even think of it as a business, so they can either rip you off or get you out of the way in five years to make way for the new groups.
From the very depth of my being, I challenge the right of any man or any group of men, in business or in government, to tell a fellow human being that he or she is expendable.
My background was computer science and business school, so eventually I worked my way up where I was running product groups - development, testing, marketing, user education.
