Constant work, constant writing and constant revision. The real writer learns nothing from life. He is more like an oyster or a sponge. What he takes in he takes in normally the way any person takes in experience. But it is what is done with it in hi...
The real Jack Johnson was both more and less than those who loved or those who hated him ever knew. He embodied American individualism in its purest form; nothing - no law or custom, no person white or black, male or female - could keep him for long ...
Look, I'm not a perfect person. I have my warts. I sometimes say things that get me in trouble. I wear suits that are cheap. But I say what I think and I believe what I say, and I'm willing to say things that are not popular but ordinary people know ...
The world, my friend Govinda, is not imperfect, or on a slow path towards perfection: no, it is perfect in every moment, all sin already carries the divine forgiveness in itself, all small children already have the old person in themselves, all infan...
The historical Woodrow Wilson suffered from numerous complaints which we might today label as psychosomatic. Yet, Wilson did have a stroke as a relatively young man of 39 and seemed always to be ill. He was 'high-strung' - intensely neurotic - yet a ...
My tides were fluctuating, too - back and forth, back and forth - sometimes so fast they seemed to be spinning. They call this 'rapid cycling.' It's a marvel that a person can appear to be standing still when the mood tides are sloshing back and fort...
Let me explain something about guitar playing. Everyone's got their own character, and that's the thing that's amazed me about guitar playing since the day I first picked it up. Everyone's approach to what can come out of six strings is different fro...
I'm not going to tell a person how to think, don't believe in that. What I want to do, when I write these books, is just to say don't be so sure of yourself. Let me pull the carpet out from underneath you, and let's see if you can still find the foot...
Stop searching for that perfect person you hope for. Stop searching for someone who would meet the standards you set as spouse material, instead love the one who's already next to you, who has always been there for you, and never done you wrong. Perf...
I admired Truman, among many other things, because he integrated the Army. I admired JFK because the very first civil rights legislation was passed at his insistence. JFK showed what you could do, though he was a deeply flawed person, as we all now k...
Governmental intervention and personal responsibility are not mutually exclusive issues, but they do frame a 'do it ourselves' vs. 'what are you doing for us' debate. For the black community, that's a debate that's been raging at least as far back as...
All I have to do is be me on stage. But acting, I have to be someone else, and walk how they would walk and blink how they would blink. I used to talk about it bad like, 'Aw man, that person made $10 million a movie?' But now I understand why they do...
I used to have quite long hair, and I decided that I wanted to get it cut. I'd never met the person who did it, and she cut it into some kind of dreadful mullet. It looked like a triangle on my head. The other kids were merciless.
Longing, whether for a passion or person, is one of the most powerful, yet painful, emotions there is. It can drive you to its source under the most extreme conditions, or it can cripple you from obtaining your dreams. When it comes to the pull you f...
It’s complicated, what makes a person. I think…part of it is experience—whether you seek them out or they come to you—and your reactions to them. Even then, you may not know exactly how something affects you, and sometimes that says even more...
That's the way blacks have been encouraged to think: that we got to stick together. You've got a situation today where if a black person says he thinks O.J. Simpson's guilty, other blacks will cut their eyes at him and say, 'You ought to go somewhere...
In 2008, as a matter of fact, I had people accusing me of being a Senator Obama supporter because I wouldn't slam him. I said, 'Well, consider the fact that I voted for impeachment for President Clinton, but it wasn't a personal vote. I voted based o...
I have 18 tattoos. My tattoos have kind of become their own person. Everybody does stories on them. It is risky to be successful in the fashion industry and to tat your body up, but I figured, the way that I made my career and the way that I am succe...
Self-betrayal occurs when we do to another what we sense we should not do or don't do what we sense we should. Thus self-betrayal is a sort of moral self-compromise, a violation of our own personal sense of how we ought to be and what we ought to do.
The self-help movement that began in the latter half of the twentieth century suffers particularly from this flaw, for the personal and interpersonal skills it seeks to cultivate are almost always designed to get us more of what we think we want, rat...
I went to Ethiopia, and it dawned on me that you can tell a starving, malnourished person because they've got a bloated belly and a bald head. And I realized that if you come through any American airport and see businessmen running through with bloat...
