Here’s how I learned to improvise: I played some music in the studio and I started to move. It sounds obvious, but I wonder how many people, whatever their medium, appreciate the gift of improvisation. It’s your one opportunity in life to be comp...
I believe in god. I also believe that you should never ask god to make your dreams come true. You have to work for your dreams. And dream actually, with all your mind body and soul. I don’t believe luck is when a super power grants us what we wishe...
Our culture doesn't seem to value competence as much as it used to. Now we seem to want to do and get everything as quickly as possible, which often leads to mediocre work and products. It seems to be the exception to find people at stores and busine...
Quantum fluctuations are, at their root, completely a-causal, in the sense that cause and effect and ordering of events in time is not a part of how these fluctuations work. Because of this, there seem not to be any correlations built into these kind...
Are you still running that bar?” Maureen’s voice dropped to a shocked whisper on the last word and Hope rolled her eyes, working the pick through Maureen’s thick hair. “The Cue Club? Yes, ma’am, I am.” Angel leaned forward with her best d...
Let us begin by giving all proper respect to what neuroscience can tell us about ourselves: it reveals some of the most important conditions that are necessary for behavior and awareness. What neuroscience does not do, however, is provide a satisfact...
Imagine that you are stuck on a long train ride and must choose one of two books to read in order to pass the time: the first is a novel whose main character is an office worker who is essentially working to pay his monthly cable bill; the second is ...
How remote we were too from the crazy musicians who arrived on a blustery fall day with the idea that, since this was a financial center, there would be a rain of coins from the tall buildings in response to their trumpet, guitar, and bass fiddle. Th...
For me a work of fiction exists only insofar as it affords me what I shall bluntly call aesthetic bliss, that is a sense of being somehow, somewhere, connected with other states of being where art (curiosity, tenderness, kindness, ecstasy) is the nor...
Who can see inside the deepest recesses of your imagination and manifest those wishes into your daily experience? Who can appreciate those subtle nuances of character you've acquired by overcoming your deepest fears? Who can truly respect those thing...
Years later, on a Steve Jobs discussion board on the website Gawker, the following tale appeared from someone who had worked at the Whole Foods store in Palo Alto a few blocks from Jobs' home: 'I was shagging carts one afternoon when I saw this silve...
Today you go into make a modern recording with all this technology. The bass plays first, then the drums come in later, then they track the trumpet and the singer comes in and they ship the tape somewhere. Well, none of the musicians have played toge...
The woman who undergoes this operation can sense the morphogenetic field at work in her face. She can feel the lines of force as they guide the embryonic cells into the patterns they must form. Why should a woman let her life be determined by tired c...
Every time you post something online, you have a choice. You can either make it something that adds to the happiness levels in the world—or you can make it something that takes away. I tried to add something by starting Girl Online. And for a while...
You're my sister," he said finally. "My sister, my blood, my family. I should want to protect you"—he laughed soundlessly without any humor—"to protect you from the sort of boys who want to do with you exactly what I want to do." Clary's breath c...
I don’t know. How can you know? I…I’m a monster. When I’m hungry, I might do anything." "Oh no, of course I couldn’t possibly understand you." Violet’s shadowed face seemed to be wearing a grim and serious smile. "I know, you woke up one ...
How far we all come. How far we all come away from ourselves. So far, so much between, you can never go home again. You can go home, it's good to go home, but you never really get all the way home again in your life. And what's it all for? All I trie...
Well, Betsy," he said, "your mother tells me that you are going to use Uncle Keith's trunk for a desk. That's fine. You need a desk. I've often noticed how much you like to write. The way you eat up those advertising tablets from the store! I never s...
You don't know what it's like to grow up with a mother who never said a positive thing in her life, not about her children or the world, who was always suspicious, always tearing you down and splitting your dreams straight down the seams. When my fir...
I was lonely, deadly lonely. And I was to find out then, as I found out so many times, over and over again, that women especially are social beings, who are not content with just husband and family, but must have a community, a group, an exchange wit...
I thought all I had to do to get you back was kill off your so-called mother and that little girl. No, I also pondered eating you alive. I imagined drinking all your blood and swallowing you whole many times. A thousand times...no, a million times ov...
