The body, I had been taught, wants only to live. Suicide, I had understood, is an act not of the body against itself but of the will against the body. Yet here I beheld a body that was going to die rather than change its nature.
The one thing emphasized in any creative writing course is 'write what you know,' and that automatically drives a wooden stake through the heart of imagination. If they really understood the mysterious process of creating fiction, they would say, 'Yo...
One of the biggest lessons I've learned during my time on 'Oprah' is that everyone wants to be heard. We all want to have our humanity acknowledged - to have others see us for who we truly are. We all want to know that we are valued, we are heard, we...
I never quite understood these actors - though I envy them sometimes - who can lie out for a year or two. I feel as though time is a real pressing issue, and I want to get as much work done in the time that I have left.
I often think about image, and image is something that - but in truth, the real artistic process, as I've understood it, is 95 percent intuitive, like seat-of-the-pants, at-the-moment decisions that you can't even explain, you know?
I understood why films were made, and if they made a lot of money, they were successful. All of these things I knew. As a ten-year-old boy, I didn't really think a lot about finances or celebrity. I always viewed films as kind of what I imagined a su...
When a man says he is building a house for himself and his posterity, he does not mean to be understood as saying that he has any thought of binding them, nor is it to be inferred that he is so foolish as to imagine that he has any right or power to ...
One day in 1984, at the height of his fame, Michael Jackson made a visit to the White House. President and Nancy Reagan may not have dug his music, but they understood the power Mr. Jackson commanded as a common pop-cultural touchstone for just about...
In the late '70s I was asked to sing for the first time in Germany. I'll never forget it. It was at a festival in Bremen. The German audience went berserk and the reviews were a phenomenon. For some reason the German audience understood how technical...
Remember those black-and-white films with Frank Sinatra? Those guys looked like men and they were only 27! Listen to Otis Redding singing 'Try A Little Tenderness'. That was a man who understood what a man has to know in the world. Show me a real man...
For if the mystery concealed of old is made manifest to the Apostles through the prophetic writings, and if the prophets, being wise men, understood what proceeded from their own mouths, then the prophets knew what was made manifest to the Apostles.
I was very insecure at the beginning of my career. I didn't value my talent. I would have probably skipped signing up for movies that I didn't want to do if I had understood that I had been accepted and people liked my work.
It was always understood that plants and animals, though completely contrasted in their higher representatives, approached each other very closely in their lower and simpler forms. But they were believed not to blend.
And like nectar inside the bud, my blood drinks from your blood, beloved, and starves to join the salvation in your eyes; to be understood again and again, by your nakedness and certainty, a humbleness that trickles into the crevices of my seasoned m...
The ideas of were popularized by people who only imperfectly understood them, who were incapable of the great effort required to grasp them in their relationship to larger truths, and who therefore assigned to them a prominence out of all proportion ...
The world of a cat is unlike any other. What is seen through their eyes cannot be understood by anyone besides another cat. Their world is filled with secrets and adventures that are always present and forever changing. To look at the world as a cat ...
Frankly speaking, I decided to become a businessman at the moment when I understood that it is possible, because I grew up in a country where it was not possible. There existed even a special article in the penal code of the Soviet Union which punish...
If you insist upon fighting to protect me, or 'our' country, let it be understood soberly and rationally between us that you are fighting to gratify a sex instinct which I cannot share; to procure benefits where I have not shared and probably will no...
Sanctification is not to be understood here as a separation from ordinary use or consecration to some special use, although this meaning is often present in Scripture, sometimes referring to outward and sometimes to inward or effectual separation.
Because the fact of not being understood by other people had become my only real source of pride, I was never confronted by any impulse to express things and to make others understand something that I knew.
I became interested in making books, starting about 1965, when I did the Serial Project #1, deciding that I needed a small book to show how the work could be understood and how the system worked.
