What I'm fighting for now in my work... for an expression relevant to all manner of blacks, poems I could take into a tavern, into the street, into the halls of a housing project.
When you're young, you develop ways to win, and you think they will always work, but then you get to the top, competing against the other top athletes, and sometimes things don't work.
After I finished college, I got a job on Wall Street as a derivatives trader, but after a couple years of it, I was calling in sick in order to work on my novel.
When I grew up, I had a lot of fun ski racing with my friends. We pushed each other, and this made it easier to work hard.
There's pride on Bourbon Street for the musicians that work there. They take it very seriously. I've never worked there or played in band there, but it's a part of the city. They play for the tourists and represent a whole different side of the cultu...
In the fall of 1968, I became attractive to women. One day I was an ignored schlub in the street, then suddenly all these good-looking women were interested in me.
The Iraq War. No one took to the streets over it. It certainly would have been appropriate. If anybody even hinted we should... you were called un-American and not supporting the troops.
Normally street children are shown in terms of the tragedy of their lives - which is true - but there's also another dimension: their wisdom, dignity and enormous capacity for survival.
People often talk about the pain and degradation of being bullied. No one really talks about the cost. Not that money is more important than those other things, but having to pay the expenses of your own humiliation just rubbed rock salt into the wou...
The shiny black nose of a fox appears through her door before the rest of it steps tentatively across the wooden floor to where she’s cooking. A pile of children’s clothes lie discarded in a corner of the room. The fox knows what she is cooking a...
We're always thinking of eternity as an idea that cannot be understood, something immense. But why must it be? What if, instead of all this, you suddenly find just a little room there, something like a village bath-house, grimy, and spiders in every ...
Historians are left forever chasing shadows, painfully aware of their inability ever to reconstruct a dead world in its completeness however thorough or revealing their documentation. We are doomed to be forever hailing someone who has just gone arou...
Time and again I hear how important the darker environment is to those at our vintage-faith worship gathering. Attenders feel they can freely pray in a corner by themselves without feeling that everyone is staring at them.
Deciding to wait, Scott sat down with a pint away from the bar at a corner table and lit a cigarette. The clientele in there on Sunday afternoon were the same as most other afternoons. From middle-aged to old men, drinking and cursing at the world li...
I am releasing my own demons of times gone by and seizing the opportunity to find my own corner, my own fortress, my own calm and peace. Life is not unfair.
I noticed that in a corner, across from where they ate with such innocent relish, sitting forlorn and abandoned, was the ghost of their son. He had lost both of his arms, one side of his face was squashed, and both his eyes had burst. He had bluish w...
I suppose the best way to tell the story is simply to narrate it, without an effort to carry belief. The thing did not require belief. It was not a feeling of horror in one's bones, or a misty outline, or anything that needed to be given actuality by...
You put yourself in a tight corner of failure if you think "it's only the rich that get richer while the poor get poorer". No! Something good can come out from you no matter who you are, what you have done and where you have been to!
When at a networking event, there's usually a guy alone in the corner talking to himself. That guy is me. Stop by and say hi. My nametag will say Bob, because even if you’re dyslexic you’ll say my name right.
When I’m lonely I stand in the corner and play my saxophone and feel sorry for myself. I would ask you to accompany me on the piano, but if I did that I wouldn’t be lonely, would I? And what’s the point of a saxophone if not to celebrate despai...
...Something we once loved, and love now, in the shape of a book. Maybe eBooks are going to take over, one day, but not until those whizzkids in Silicon Valley invent a way to bend the corners, fold the spine, yellow the pages, add a coffee ring or t...
