To start, I wasn't really interested in acting at all, and I didn't make much impact. The first play I was in was on for five nights and I didn't show up for two of them and nobody noticed. But I stayed because that's where my friends were, and after...
I'm all about entertaining and keeping a reader on the edge of their seat, so to me, the social issues have to be meaningful and give the book what's really 'at stake,' but ultimately it's not about them - it's always a personal story of everyday peo...
I hoped at first to find a rather more direct comprehension of life in one or two novelists and poets; but if they really had such a comprehension, it must be confessed they did not show it; most of them, I thought, did not really live - contented th...
I read everything I could find in English - Twain, Henry James, Hemingway, really everything. And then after a while I started writing shorter pieces in English, and one of them got published in a literary magazine and that's how it got started. Afte...
If in previous decades large historic events drew people together and oriented them toward collective action, the recent double trend toward greater choice but less security leads the young to see their lives in more individual terms. Big events coll...
You know what? I feel my book is kind of pointless. I didn't want to do a book, but rather than tell the same old stories over and over when my wife Angie and I are out at parties, I could just hand out a bunch of books, and she won't have to hear th...
My favorite country blues player was Big Bill Broonzy. City blues was Freddie King, but I liked them all - Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker, Ralph Willis, Lonnie Johnson, Brownie McGhee and the three Kings, B.B., Albert and Freddie. Jazz-wise, I listene...
The thing we call critics are not really reviewers, they are not really critics. They don't have the discipline to write what we would term as critique - it's really just reviewers. They have a common man kind of taste. If you watch them overall, the...
No one really knows what I'm really like, and you won't unless you spend a day with me, or if you're my friend. No one ever knows what anyone is really like. Read all the interviews you want on them, it's just the media talking and you can't really g...
We judge others instantly by their clothes, their cars, their appearance, their race, their education, their social status. The list is endless. What gets me is that most people decide who another person is before they have even spoken to them. What'...
Well we are nothing if not re-inventive. With every life experience we learn what to not do ever again and how to adapt to our current situations. We are always learning about ourselves and changing. I seriously don’t know anyone that has it all fi...
I learned how to be a learner. When you get in a job, the tendency is to say, 'I've got to know it. I've got to give direction to others. I'm in this job because I'm better and smarter.' I always took a different view, that the key was to identify th...
(1) Use mathematics as shorthand language, rather than as an engine of inquiry. (2) Keep to them till you have done. (3) Translate into English. (4) Then illustrate by examples that are important in real life (5) Burn the mathematics. (6) If you can�...
People become desensitized to many things going on around them. It is because they always see it on the tv, hear it on the radio, read or watch it on the internet, hear about it at work etc. Then immoral acts are tuned to a deaf ear. Then no one want...
Growing up is never straight forward. There are moments when everything is fine, and other moments where you realize that there are certain memories that you'll never get back, and certain people that are going to change, and the hardest part is know...
In life we come across people who ditch us, break us. But we still continue to trust. We are scared of getting hurt again but we still trust, still share and still open our hearts to them. Why? Why do we trust even after knowing that people change?
The early pictures of me you see online, in just T-shirts and hoodies - I'm still that guy with the hoodie. But what you don't get to see in most of those pics is that I had these red clogs on that had, like, eyeballs on the ends of them that I drew ...
Mitt doesn't like to talk about how he has helped others because he sees it as a privilege, not a political talking point. And we're no different than the millions of Americans who quietly help their neighbors, their churches and their communities. T...
In a democracy the poor will have more power than the rich, because there are more of them, and the will of the majority is supreme. & It is also in the interests of a tyrant to keep his people poor, so that they may not be able to afford the cost of...
Some of the biggest challenges in relationships come from the fact that most people enter a relationship in order to get something: they're trying to find someone who's going to make them feel good. In reality, the only way a relationship will last i...
If your friend's feeling bad, it's hard to know what to do. Do you back away or try to help them? It's a really hard situation that I've been in. You want to support your friend. You want to be there. My advice is, don't get too involved with it, jus...