Black people comprehend the South. We understand its weight. It has rested on our backs... I knew that my heart would break if ever I put my foot down on that soil, moist, still, with old hurts. I had to face the fear/loathing at its source or it wou...
Protect your good image from the eyes of negative viewers, who may look at your good appearance with an ugly fiendish eye, and ruin your positive qualities with their chemical infested tongues. If the words from the mouth of an abusive man makes you ...
I "love" reading. It makes me feel like I am swallowing up Christ, Homer, Confucius, Newton, Franklin, Socrates, Caesar, and the whole world into one gigantic invincible Sir Moffat. Mine is creative reading. I read building empires in mind. I pray I ...
Instead of inventing imaginary friends, I invented whole imaginary worlds. They were elaborate scenarios about spies and adventurers and top secret missions. I crawled along my swing set, searching for escape routes from my maximum-security prison; I...
The mind is like a circuit of Christmas tree lights. When the brain works well, all of the lights twinkle brilliantly, and it’s adaptable enough that, often, even if one bulb goes out, the rest will still shine on. But depending on where the damage...
New scientific ideas never spring from a communal body, however organized, but rather from the head of an individually inspired researcher who struggles with his problems in lonely thought and unites all his thought on one single point which is his w...
TV is the place for writers to live. This is where you have creative control and you're constantly writing. 'Twilight' had almost a TV schedule to it. I was constantly working on these projects. There was not a whole lot of lull but I've gone onto ot...
We need to shed our unearthly and nonsocial and idealistic and romantic and uber-spiritual visions of kingdom and get back to what Jesus meant. By kingdom, Jesus means: God's Dream Society on earth, spreading out from the land of Israel to encompass ...
So I have to create the whole thing afresh for myself each time. Probably all writers now are in the same boat. It is the penalty we pay for breaking with tradition, and the solitude makes the writing more exciting though the being read less so. One ...
Often as a poet I find that I am somewhat outside an experience I want to hold onto, consciously taking mental notes or writing them down in my journal - for fear that I will forget. It's not unlike being on a trip and taking pictures, your face behi...
At a book festival in Fort Lauderdale, I met David Eisenhower, Ike's grandson, who was promoting his book 'Going Home to Glory: A Memoir of Life with Dwight D. Eisenhower,' in which he describes attending the Yankees' 154th game in 1961. The whole fa...
I kind of grew up with a mix of two things. One was kind of this individual work ethic that my father and my stepfather and my mother all taught me, which was never depend on anyone else to do things for you, and work really hard on your own. At the ...
I grew up with a single mother, and although we didn't have a lot of money, she cared a great deal about what we ate. We were the original health-food family. We shopped at what were called health-food stores before Whole Foods - everything came from...
I've done four other films since 'Submarine,' so that's quite cool. It's just good to have people respect your work; I've never had that before. Yeah, my life has changed crazy. I'm a kid from a small town in south Wales, I play my Xbox usually and a...
I do, I kick major butt in 'Dredd.' I get to kill people. I break a guy's neck by roundhouse kicking him in the face. It was me, I did it. I learned how to roundhouse kick. I also do it with my hands cuffed behind my back so it's pretty cool I have t...
If I wasn't even famous or had any success, I would still wake up and put tons of make-up on, and put on a cool outfit. That's always been who I've been my whole life, so that's never gonna change. I love fashion. I love getting dressed up. I love Ha...
You might have, as a character, 30 pages of dialogue a day if you're what they call a 'front-burner story.' So you go home, you learn your lines for the next day, you get up, you're there at 7 in the morning, you do a quick rehearsal, you're on camer...
I think the least important thing about science fiction for me is its predictive capacity. Its record for being accurately predictive is really, really poor! If you look at the whole history of science fiction, what people have said is going to happe...
OK, so my parents were married in 1955 and my mom knew my dad was gay and my dad knew he was gay and so I was, like, 'Why in the heck did you get married?' Like, what was going on? What was that time? It's like this crazy paradox that my whole life i...
I do find it challenging to leave stuff out. Two of my models for novel-writing are 'The Great Gatsby' and 'As I Lay Dying,' both very short books. I've never wanted to write a 600-page novel, not that I think there's anything wrong with them. For me...
I was always very different from the other kids. I have an I.Q. of 156. I didn't play sports. I thought big. I thought I could achieve great things. I don't want to sound megalomaniac, but my whole life is about doing something for the world, from as...