You want me to go back into that house protected by a magic sticky note?” “Don’t even start,” I told him. “It’s working. If it weren’t working, you couldn’t drag me into that place.” “What did you write on here? ‘Don’t die’?...
Shakespeare is absolutely big in Africa. I guess he's big everywhere. Growing up, Shakespeare was the thing. You'd learn monologues and you'd recite them. And just like hip-hop, it made you feel like you knew how to speak English really well. You had...
Inside our skulls are fish, reptile and shrew brains, as well as the highest centers that allow us to integrate information in our unique way; and some of our newer brain components talk to each other via some very ancient structures indeed. Our brai...
For over a century, an evolving microcosm of Anthropology’s turbulent history has hidden behind the staid façade of the American Museum of Natural History. From an insider’s perspective, the well-known ethnologist Stan Freed engagingly introduce...
But the question is, historically, part of the group that you're a part of - whether it's racial, gender, religious, whatever - how has your group fared historically? The groups that you're a part of? Like, for me, as an atheist, Jew, I'm gonna go on...
Emma has been meaning to read more ever since she was twelve years old. I have seen a great many lists of her drawing-up at various times of books that she meant to read regularly through—and very good lists they were—very well chosen, and very n...
It is precisely, if paradoxically, because reversal is in the service of repetition (so as to ensure, alongside its companion strategies, a dizzying proliferation of citations) that it gains a subversive power rather than remain a mere dependent (and...
Incidentally, one has to be very careful with that ‘Bridegroom’ imagery. It is so very apt to land one in Male and Female Principles, Eleusis, and the womb of the Great Mother. And that sort of thing doesn’t make much appeal to well-balanced wo...
It's important when you're married not to forget those things you used to do when you were trying to get her to marry you. You can't send flowers and buy gifts then, when you're married, say, 'Right, get my tea on'. That doesn't go down well. So you'...
I really think I write about everyday life. I don't think I'm quite as odd as others say I am. Life is intrinsically, well, boring and dangerous at the same time. At any given moment the floor may open up. Of course, it almost never does; that's what...
I’m trying in all my stories to get the feeling of the actual life across—not to just depict life—or criticize it—but to actually make it alive. So that when you have read something by me you actually experience the thing. You can’t do this...
Really, doesn´t everything make sense? There are, of course, things from which we more or less recover, although some of them are too harsh even for saints. But that is no reason to accuse God. Even if there are reasons to doubt him, the fact that h...
Fame is fun, money is useful, celebrity can be exciting, but finally life is about optimal well-being and how we achieve that in dominator culture, in a greedy culture, in a culture that uses so much of the world’s resources. How do men and women, ...
Well we're waiting here in Allentown, For the Pennsylvania we never found, For the promises our teachers gave, If we worked hard, If we behaved... So the graduations hang on the wall, But they never really helped us at all, No they never taught us wh...
You've heard me call myself a bluesman and a blues singer. I call myself a blues singer, but you ain't never heard me call myself a blues guitar man. Well, that's because there's been so many can do it better'n I can, play the blues better'n me. I th...
People say, 'Well, whose career do you follow? Where do you see your career going? What movie do you want to do next?' And I can't tell you what type of movie I would go and do next. I would have to read the script and feel for a character. And if I ...
At their best, religious and spiritual communities help us discover this pure and naked spiritual encounter. At their worst, they simply make us more ashamed, pressuring us to cover up more, pushing us to further enhance our image with the best desig...
I've worked with the Los Angeles Zoo for 45 years, and we have this magnificent photographer, Tad Motoyama. He takes these wonderful, wonderful animal pictures. All through the years he's given me copies of these pictures. Well, I have all these gorg...
Don't try to be young. Just open your mind. Stay interested in stuff. There are so many things I won't live long enough to find out about, but I'm still curious about them. You know people who are already saying, 'I'm going to be 30 - oh, what am I g...
I have learned that I, we, are a dollar-a-day people (which is terrible, they say, because a cow in Japan is worth $9 a day). This means that a Japanese cow would be a middle class Kenyan... a $9-a-day cow from Japan could very well head a humanitari...
When you see a fish you don't think of its scales, do you? You think of its speed, its floating, flashing body seen through the water. Well, I've tried to express just that. If I made fins and eyes and scales, I would arrest its movement, give a patt...
