When I used to teach creative writing, I would tell the students to make their characters want something right away - even if it's only a glass of water. Characters paralyzed by the meaninglessness of modern life still have to drink water from time t...
If you want to know the truth,” he says, leaning forward like he’s getting ready to tell a really good story, “it has to do with Kelsey. And the biggest lie of all.” And that’s when I realize the thing about the truth. It always comes out, ...
I always imagined that having a baby is something that I'm going to keep in a private place, but maybe my curse is that all I'm going to want to do is tell everybody about what my birth process was like and what my children's nightmares are.
I hold that the beginning of modern Irish drama was in the winter of 1898, at a school feast at Coole, when Douglas Hyde and Miss Norma Borthwick acted in Irish in a Punch and Judy show; and the delighted children went back to tell their parents what...
Clinical psychology tells us arguably that trauma is the ultimate killer.Memories r not recycled like atoms and particles in quantum physics. they can be lost forever. It’s sort of like my past is an unfinished painting and as the artist of that pa...
I've never really considered doing stand up, but I have done readings/spoken word things fairly often in which I'll just tell a bunch of stories and run off at the mouth. I'm a big tangent person.
I don't think about a theory of everything when I do my research. And even if we knew the ultimate underlying theory, how are you going to explain the fact that we're sitting here? Solving string theory won't tell us how humanity was born.
In love, as in life, one misheard word can be tremendously important. If you tell someone you love them, for instance, you must be absolutely certain that they have replied "I love you back" and not "I love your back" before you continue the conversa...
I'm never really upset when a person lies because I don't place much value in truths. When you look at the grand design, you realize that there are no truths, only stories. In other words, the only truth is that we are all stories. Lies are just part...
Novels by serious writers of genius often eventually become best-sellers, but most contemporary best-sellers are written by second-class writers whose psychological brew contains a touch of naïvety, a touch of sentimentality, the story-telling gift,...
I am sitting with a philosopher in the garden. He says again and again, “I know that that’s a tree,” pointing to a tree that is near us. Someone else arrives and hears this, and I tell them, “This fellow isn’t insane. We are only doing phil...
I've always enjoyed that kind of thing - thinking about the production of narrative and why it is that when we read a novel, we don't notice the fact that someone who might be very close-mouthed or tight-lipped is perfectly willing to tell us a story...
If we don't plant the right things, we will reap the wrong things. It goes without saying. And you don't have to be, you know, a brilliant biochemist and you don't have to have an IQ of 150. Just common sense tells you to be kind, ninny, fool. Be kin...
Early on, I was so impressed with Charles Dickens. I grew up in the South, in a little village in Arkansas, and the whites in my town were really mean, and rude. Dickens, I could tell, wouldn't be a man who would curse me out and talk to me rudely.
I couldn't tell fact from fiction, Or if the dream was true My only sure prediction In this world was you. I'd touch your features inchly. Beard love and dared the cost, The sented spiel reeled me unreal And I found my senses lost.
Get up," I tell myself, "You go and make your dreams a reality. There's no use staying home and whine every time life beats you down. There's a meadow in the deep forest; you just have to keep pushing through.
When I was in high school, I liked to pretend that I was a Russian foreign exchange student. I would do things like go into a pizza restaurant and tell them I'd never had pizza before, and they'd bring me into the kitchen and show me how to make an A...
I've always wanted to do action stuff. I like it. You really want something that's special; that's got something special about it and not cheesy, I guess. I'll tell you something, it's fun, it's different. Comedy is difficult. Doing comedy is very di...
They have what you call a black night where they have black people come in for just one night only to watch comedy, and you get all your local drug dealers, thugs, prostitutes, all of them come in, sit down, and listen to you tell jokes. They the har...
They keep telling you this: Have faith! But which faith? That is the crucial question! Here is a good faith you can have: Every truth can be changed through our own intelligence! Trust human mind, trust science, and this is a golden faith! Your salva...
First of all, the Big Bang wasn't very big. Second of all, there was no bang. Third, Big Bang Theory doesn't tell you what banged, when it banged, how it banged. It just said it did bang. So the Big Bang theory in some sense is a total misnomer.
