We often compare the experience of writing a book to that of playing God. It is up to us, and only us, to determine what happens to the people we invent. It is for us alone to determine what is good and bad, just and unjust, appropriate and inappropriate for the worlds we create. I love that about writing books.
It's failure, really, that you grow by, although nobody likes to experience it.
Happiness is a mysterious concept. It seems to work best as futurity: at that point I will be happy, et cetera. I feel like I experience small pieces of joy day to day.
People who are seriously damaged by sudden fame and notoriety have, in my experience, very low esteem at the root of their being.
University was a chance to people-watch and to mix with people from all various walks of life, which as an actor is a great experience because you get to observe people.
My experience, with both my parents, is that grief has a lot of down, sad things, but I was also really emotionally raw, in the first year after each of them passed. Flowers smelled more intensely, my relationships were hotter, and I was more willing to risk. I was going for it a lot more. I was 'unsober' and I wasn't playing by my rules.
Actually, I was the seventh private explorer but the first Canadian 'space clown.' I never dreamed of going into space; I just dreamed of traveling. But I admit that space is an incredible destination and the absolute traveling experience.
In my experience, working as an intelligence analyst with my own pool of sources numbering close to 100, by far the most effective forms of human intelligence collection are rapport-building and direct questioning.
For me, titles are either a natural two-second experience or stressful enough to give you an ulcer. If they don't pop out perfect on the first try, they can be really hard to repair. Or, worse, if the author thinks they pop out perfect, but the publishing house does not agree, it's difficult to shift gears. And then? Then you go insane.
I try to think of it not as writer's block, but a time where you just need to live life and experience things so you have something to write about.
Performing is a profound experience, at least for me.
When you work so hard on making a film, it's all worthwhile when you get to experience seeing that film with an audience who thoroughly enjoy it and react to the movie.
The terms of poetry - some simple, some complicated, some ancient, some new - should bring us closer to what we're hearing, enlarging our experience of it, enabling us to describe what we're reading, to feel and think with greater precision.
I think many years ago I got on a bus in L.A. and drove around to see the stars' homes, but that's the extent of my direct experience in Hollywood.
It was amazing for me to play a character opposite Benedict Cumberbatch - he's someone who I've looked up to for years - and the idea that I would work with him and then become friends with him was an amazing experience.
I try to use my experience and the fact that I grew up in the ghetto - I tell people you don't have to rob or steal to get out of the ghetto.
We feel we have to put concrete on every inch of land. It disturbs the ecology, and it takes away the experience of a child going out into the woods and seeing all of nature.
I don't know any writer for whom it comes easily. Maybe John Updike - a story would just seem to come to him whole, you know, out of a personal experience. But the rest of us, I think, are not so lucky, and I had to work hard, yeah.
I suppose with any character that you play you always bring your personal experience to it. You always bring people that you know or that you've met and sort of - this is what I do, I mean, I don't know what anyone else does - but people that you know or that you've met that have affected you in certain ways, you bring into it.
The first year of the Boot Ride was an amazing experience. Seeing people come out from all over, ride and, most importantly, put on their boots, was an inspiration.
Unending joy is actually closer to us than our own skin, and there is nothing we have to do or get or be to experience it. All we have to do is stop driving it away.
I was always self-conscious about the fact that I didn't have as much comedy experience as other people at 'SNL,' and I kept thinking they were going to realize they'd made a mistake by hiring me.
Most of the people that I deal with are human. So I've had a lot of experience with that.
We, in Syria, our point of view stems from our experience.
Only a consistent, ongoing, deep experience can make a lasting media brand: one that has a commitment from a core community and the respect of a larger reading public.
I always believe that my greatest audience will come from 70-year-old Jewish men and Jewish women, but that's me from my experience of going to High Holiday services and being adored by the women with free candy in the back.
'Macbeth' is one of the best operas ever, and doing it was a great experience. I added some things to the opera based from my experience on the movie - such as some of the special effects and bits of film - to make it new and interesting. It was a very good work and a very good experience.
London 2012 was superb. It was the best triathlon experience in a million years.
Meaning is something we experience more than we attain. It's like finding a nice, easy current in a river that carries you through life.
When I went to college, I met a new group of friends and looked back on my high-school experience and realized how much time I had wasted on trying to make myself something I wasn't.
The prism through which you experience life is so unique. There is no objective experience.
Meditation is not the construction of something foreign, it is not an effort to attain and then hold on to a particular experience. We may have a secret desire that through meditation we will accumulate a stockpile of magical experiences, or at least a mystical trophy or two, and then we will be able to proudly display them for others to see.
Customers want high-quality food, good service, and good store experience, and most retailers fail to deliver on those.
I enjoy that with theater, you can just go into a room with a paper bag lunch: there're no cables, no electricity. It's the purest experience.
When theology erodes and organization crumbles, when the institutional framework of religion begins to break up, the search for a direct experience which people can feel to be religious facilitates the rise of cults.
Every country should conduct its own reforms, should develop its own model, taking into account the experience of other countries, whether close neighbours or far away countries.
