I inhaled the musty, leathery, old-papery scent and a shiver passed over me. If I had any idea of heaven, it was this: shelves and shelves of books, ten times as many as were upstairs, each with stories or pictures more exciting and beautiful than th...
I do not listen when anyone uses the word immoral," said the Wizard. "In the young it is ridiculous, in the old it is sententious and reactionary and an early warning sign of apoplexy. In the middle-aged, who love and fear the idea of moral life the ...
I had a dream about you. I invented and sold shoes that left no footprints, and you were thinking about committing a murder in a muddy area. I said that committing a murder was a bad idea, and that you should commit several murders, but I was just tr...
John looks at the motorcycle and he sees steel in various shapes and has negative feelings about these steel shapes and turns off the whole thing. I look at the shapes of the steel now and I see ideas. He thinks I'm working on parts. I'm working on c...
I think the best thing we can do is sell that idea of smaller government - of fiscal responsibility vs. the Obama record. Obama made promises, and on every promise in which he's actually delivered, things have gotten worse instead of better. He said ...
I had never killed myself before, so I had no idea what would I want to listen to when it was too late for me to skip to the next song. Like, maybe when you're dying, you actually want to hear something really upbeat.
I believe that the idea of the totality, the finality of the master-plan, is misguided. One should advocate a gradual transformation of public space, a metamorphic process, without relying on a hypothetical time in the future when everything will be ...
What is it about our expectations, plans, or ideas that hold such sway over us? It is as if we've written a script for a play of our lives that runs about a month ahead of actual life; if reality varies from what we've created in our minds we disenga...
Usually when we hear or read something new, we just compare it to our own ideas. If it is the same, we accept it and say that it is correct. If it is not, we say it is incorrect. In either case, we learn nothing.
When we have a clear idea of who we are and why we live, our lives become a journey. A story is created about our lives. And when the end comes, even if the story adds up to only one line, the story reaches a settled conclusion.
(Just to give you an idea, Proust's reply was 'To be separated from Mama.') I think that the lowest depth of misery ought to be distinguished from the highest pitch of anguish. In the lower depths come enforced idleness, sexual boredom, and/or impote...
Anytime I have an idea, I'll make sure that I put it down so that when we do sit down to write an album, I don't have to dream it all out of thin air. I don't have to be creative on the spur of the moment, or spontaneously artistic. I just take advan...
The ingenious method of expressing every possible number using a set of ten symbols (each symbol having a place value and an absolute value) emerged in India. The idea seems so simple nowadays that its significance and profound importance is no longe...
When we are mired in the relative world, never lifting our gaze to the mystery, our life is stunted, incomplete; we are filled with yearning for that paradise that is lost when, as young children, we replace it with words and ideas and abstractions -...
The best way to get kids to read a book is to say: 'This book is not appropriate for your age, and it has all sorts of horrible things in it like sex and death and some really big and complicated ideas, and you’re better off not touching it until y...
One of the Georges," said Psmith, "I forget which, once said that a certain number of hours' sleep a day--I cannot recall for the moment how many--made a man something, which for the time being has slipped my memory. However, there you are. I've give...
You can hear some artists, hear five of their albums and still have no idea who they are. But if you've heard most of what I've recorded, you know me. You go from 'Honesty' to 'Going Through Hell' - you can listen to the hits, and they pretty much re...
Distance yourself from negative people who try to lower your motivation and decrease your ambition. Create space for positive people to come into your life. Surround yourself with positive people who believe in your dreams, encourage your ideas, supp...
Being stuck is a position few of us like. We want something new but cannot let go of the old - old ideas, beliefs, habits, even thoughts. We are out of contact with our own genius. Sometimes we know we are stuck; sometimes we don't. In both cases we ...
I tore up my knee break dancing. I have no idea how that happened. Apparently these legs are meant for swimming, but not dancing. I was watching an MTV video, thinking, 'I can do this.' Definitely not. I heard a pop. I sat down and it blew up like a ...
I have notebooks and sketchbooks for ideas. I also have drawers full of envelopes covered in quick outlines, scenes or scraps of dialogue that I don't want to forget. I tend to grab whatever's to hand and just get the thing down before it's lost. It'...
