It's possible that I would have been better suited to being a penguin keeper. Starting out, I thought being a writer would enable me to work in isolation. Maybe my life would be less of a misery if I weren't in a deadline-driven profession, but I don...
The way that you feel about your life will always have everything to do with the things that you constantly say to yourself. Stop worrying about what others are thinking or saying about you. Idle minds will forever have negative things to say about o...
There is a mistake technical and scientific people make. We think that if we have made a clever and thoughtful argument, based on data and smart analysis, then people will change their minds. This isn't true. If yoy want to change people's behavior, ...
I used to think that I could be successful if I pretended to be a 23-year-old black woman. I wanted to find a young black woman who would be willing to go in on this with me. I would write her novels, and then she would do the touring. I always thoug...
A disciple came to the celebrated Master of the Good Name with a question. “Rabbi, how are we to distinguish between a true master and a fake?” And the master of the good name said, “When you meet a person who poses as a master, ask him a quest...
When I first thought of the idea for 'Sweet Valley High,' I loved the idea of high school as microcosm of the real world. And what I really liked was how it moved things on from 'Sleeping Beauty'-esque romance novels where the girl had to wait for th...
Fetty Wap is a soldier, father, a mentor, a leader for people that I never thought I'd be a leader for. A role model. A son. When you think of Fetty Wap, think of the soldier that ain't never quit and never listened to what they said about me or what...
Schools train you to be ignorant with style [...] they prepare you to be a usable victim for a military industrial complex that needs manpower. As long as you're just smart enough to do a job and just dumb enough to swallow what they feed you, you're...
TO WHOM LIFE IS AN EXPERIENCE TO BE CARRIED AS FAR AS POSSIBLE... I have not meant to express my thought but to help you clarify what you yourself think... You are not any more different from me than your right leg is from your left, but what joins u...
I find it odd- the greed of mankind. People only like you for as long as they perceive they can get what they want from you. Or for as long as they perceive you are who they want you to be. But I like people for all of their changing surprises, the t...
When I first moved to New York, I had some colleagues who said I should be my straightest self - whatever that means - when I went into casting offices, but I didn't want to put on an act of what I thought was heterosexual. I just wanted to be myself...
Stories, whether they're good or bad, are expressions of interactions within society. Some may be seen as 'boring', but in their own right, they are still stories to be explored. People throughout life have more exciting endeavours than others, and t...
Stories, whether they're good or bad, are expressions of interactions within society. Some may be seen as 'boring', but in their own right, they are still stories to explored. People throughout life have more exciting endeavours than others, and that...
The introduction to horrors so young impressed on me just how helpless and vulnerable I was. Parents are supposed to empower their children to live without them but in my family, I wasn’t given permission to be my own person. I thought I needed the...
Writing on a computer feels like a recipe for writer's block. I can type so fast that I run out of thoughts, and then I sit there and look at the words on the screen, and move them around, and never get anywhere. Whereas in a notebook I just keep plo...
As for those who spite you, and seemingly just because, it's only evident that they're learning from you. Maybe you taste bad - kind of like medicine, kind of like truth - and to them, you're thought unsafe. There is flattery in being chewed out and ...
A new book is still on trial and the amateur is not in a position to judge it. It has to be tested against the great body of Christian thought down the ages and all its hidden implications (often unsuspected by the author himself) have to be brought ...
All I ask is one thing, and I’m asking this particularly of young people: please don’t be cynical. I hate cynicism, for the record, it’s my least favorite quality and it doesn’t lead anywhere. Nobody in life gets exactly what they thought the...
We have a right to decide how we want our bodies to look and feel, but unfortunately we do not exercise these rights. Instead, we tend to drift along, victims of our own ignorance of the fact that we can have what we want, if we are willing to take t...
I was influenced by autobiographical writers like Henry Miller, and I had actually done some autobiographical prose. But I just thought that comics were like virgin territory. There was so much to be done. It excited me. I couldn't draw very well. I ...
I always like to sing barefoot, but when I first started doing these dates with the symphonies, I of course thought I should clean up my act, being a Jewish girl from Long Island with a little bit of a trucker mouth. So I wore a gown and some high he...
