Most people in this society who aren't actively mad are, at best, reformed or potential lunatics.
When you pollute a river, it's a supreme injustice to those who are downstream and those who live in the river who are not human beings.
It's nice to get to know people who are the same age as you that do the same things because it's like a different level of understanding.
I like girls who like the countryside, put on walking boots and can bend with the wind a bit. If you're going to live with me, you need to be able to embrace the countryside and wet dogs.
I do not outline. There are writers I know and count as my friends who certainly do it the other way, but for me, part of the adventure is not knowing how it's going to turn out.
I don't pity any man who does hard work worth doing. I admire him. I pity the creature who does not work, at whichever end of the social scale he may regard himself as being.
A little girl who finds a puzzle frustrating might ask her busy mother (or teacher) for help. The child gets one message if her mother expresses clear pleasure at the request and quite another if mommy responds with a curt 'Don't bother me - I've got important work to do.'
My arse contemplates those who talk behind my back.
If you don't want to have to kill or capture every bad guy in the country, you have to reintegrate those who are willing to be reconciled and become part of the solution instead of a continued part of the problem. And then, above all, the resources.
Finding people who get enormous pleasure from reading books is a more and more unusual experience, and so writers just so much want to be heard.
I teach one semester a year, and this year I'm just teaching one course during that semester, a writing workshop for older students in their late 20s and early 30s, people in our graduate program who are already working on a manuscript and trying to bring it to completion.
I don't mind doing the Who tours when they come along but I want to get out there and play.
When schools produce students who learned to think on the left or on the right, they're not thinking for themselves.
The people who are making money are the ones who are writing and singing their own songs.
How do you know antiquity was foolish? How do you know the present is wise? Who made it foolish? Who made it wise?
I think it's always interesting when you see a company start moving so quickly - it's like wow, incredible. When a company like Uber starts breaking away, it's not a linear thing. It's exponential. All of a sudden, the guy you know who threw $25,000 at Uber very early on - all the sudden, that $25,000 is $25 million.
I am, first of all, a Christian and, secondly, a person with very very serious personal opinion, so I'm motivated by many many things and, certainly, not by the need or desire to satisfy other people's ideas of who I am.
Though there are lessons that can be learned about becoming a great leader, most exist inherently in the bellies of those who lead.
I see myself as someone who makes things. Definitions have never done anything but constrain.
When I was about 13, I met the coolest, chicest young woman I had ever seen. She was a neighbor of mine who became a fashion designer and had a small design studio. She taught me so many things about style and fashion. I had always loved making things, so when she told me about her career in fashion, I knew I had found my path.
A lot of the stories I've read about myself, I don't even recognize who they're writing about.
L.A. is so isolated and unhip in a way; it gives you room to figure out who you are and explore more personal stuff.
When you are not treated seriously, you develop comically. Its sense of oneself is so fractured and fragile that it's like the picked-on kid who has to become funny.
Now, I don't mind making fun of those preachers who steal money from people, they kind of deserve it.
I don't think we're at the point where most people are willing to get rid of body parts and replace them, but then again, people who shoot lasers in their eyes come out with better-than-perfect vision.
I was the person, I think, who first said the evening of September 11 that we shouldn't hold this against the Arab community, the Muslim community. We should focus on the individuals and that groups that were involved and not participate in group blame.
It is to be observed that 'angling' is the name given to fishing by people who can't fish.
For more than four decades, the Libyan people have been ruled by a tyrant - Moammar Gaddafi. He has denied his people freedom, exploited their wealth, murdered opponents at home and abroad, and terrorized innocent people around the world - including Americans who were killed by Libyan agents.
I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.
If we celebrate Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday at a time of presidential inaugurals, this is thanks to Ronald Reagan who created the holiday, and not to the Democratic Congress of the Carter years, which rejected it.
On the other end of the spectrum, these women who do live long enough to collect Social Security face the challenge of being disproportionately dependent on the Social Security system for retirement income.
The future rewards those who press on. I don't have time to feel sorry for myself. I don't have time to complain. I'm going to press on.
If you take the biological weapons in the United States we still will have perhaps a single individual who was able to make anthrax, dry it, and spread it through the mail and cause terror.
I think of myself as living so much outside borders or old categories that I choose as my leaders U2, the Dalai Lama, Vaclav Havel, Sigur Ros, Desmond Tutu, Barack Obama, and the girl next door. By definition, in short, my leaders are the ones who think in terms larger, and more intimate, than any country.
Ten people who speak make more noise than ten thousand who are silent.
It doesn't matter who scores the points, it's who can get the ball to the scorer.
