In the summer of 1966, I went to Mississippi to be in the heart of the civil-rights movement, helping people who had been thrown off the farms or taken off the welfare roles for registering to vote. While working there, I met the civil-rights lawyer ...
I think possibly what people working for one hate the most is indecision. Even if I'm completely unsure, I'll pretend I know exactly what I'm talking about and make a decision. The most important thing I can do is try and make myself very clearly und...
There is a sense in which the United States ambassador speaks to the United States, as well as for the United States. I have always seen my role as a thermostat rather than a thermometer. So I'm going to be actively working... for my own concerns. I ...
There is a vast world of work out there in this country, where at least 111 million people are employed in this country alone--many of whom are bored out of their minds. All day long. Not for nothing is their motto TGIF -- 'Thank God It's Friday.' Th...
But if the Busyness = Status equation works, it’s strictly because a social game has emerged wherein relatively privileged, educated people with all kinds of Choice disguise their decisions to be busy as manifestations of the universe’s insatiabl...
What I am in the eyes of most people - a nonentity, an eccentric, or an unpleasant person - somebody who has no position in society and will never have; in short, the lowest of the low. All right, then - even if that were absolutely true, then I shou...
Needless to say, the business of living interferes with the solitude so needed for any work of the imagination. Here's what Virginia Woolf said in her diary about the sticky issue: "I've shirked two parties, and another Frenchman, and buying a hat, a...
A lot of people who don't write for kids think it's easy, because they think kids aren't as smart as they are, or that you have to dumb down what you would normally write for kids. But I think you have to work harder when you write for kids, to make ...
I am short, so even if there are things that I like, or like on other people, I have to be aware that sometimes that won't work on me because I'm not 5'10. It has to have a shape for my body; otherwise, I look like I am two inches tall. I have to wea...
Actors, you have to wait for people to give you work, or you have to make your own stuff. But standup, I could just say, 'I want to do standup in 30 minutes,' and I can go do standup. Or I could just say, 'I want to do standup in a few weeks in this ...
I often have said to people that there are really two cities in the country where the outlook is always forward-looking - there is never really a backward-looking tendency. My banking work has taken me out to Palo Alto, what is commonly called Silico...
One day, when my son was eight, he came into the kitchen while I was cooking and said: 'You put bad words in your books, don't you?' No doubt he had overheard my mother, who often tells people who ask about my work: 'Well, you'll never find her books...
We and others have done a bunch of work to show that if your real friends online say or do something, it affects you. But if your acquaintances online say or do something, it does not. People on average have about 106 Facebook friends, but only 5 or ...
Particularly when you're dealing with very high ranking people, you know, you have to get their attention, they are used to, by their rank, of having their own way and doing their own thing and when it's necessary to all work together on something, s...
There's so much bullying with young people and them feeling like they can't come out, and they don't know what to do. And it's something that you have to work through. And, you know, for me, it was - I came out, and then I went back in for a minute. ...
Connection is health. And what our society does its best to disguise from us is how ordinary, how commonly attainable, health is. We lose our health - and create profitable diseases and dependences - by failing to see the direct connections between l...
A history of the working class in the United States should, first of all, give a sense of what is meant by "the working class in the United States." It means most of us who live in the United States of America-which, unfortunately, has not been the f...
...in Aristotle...leisure is a far more noble, spiritual goal than work...leisure is pursued solely for its own sake...: the pleasures of music and poetry, ... conversation with friends, and ...gratuitous, playful speculation. In Latin, the ultimate ...
Ready money works great cures.
Hunger, work, and sweat are the best herbs.
The lazybones must work twice.
