. . . of all the kinds of decay in this world, decadent purity is the most malignant.
I learned not to confuse 'busy' with 'productive,' but I'm still far too addicted to email to resist its early-morning digital snuggles.
No human ever became interesting by not failing. The more you fail and recover and improve, the better you are as a person. Ever meet someone who's always had everything work out for them with zero struggle? They usually have the depth of a puddle. Or they don't exist.
We're not in an information age anymore. We're in the information management age.
When you don't take an aggressive role in shaping your thoughts, feelings, and perceptions, you become a helpless passenger floating through the universe like a ghost ship, merely reacting to wherever it takes you.
If you're able to build from your falls you'll be unstoppable and damn near fearless. You see, every time you fall down and get back up, you add another piece of body armor to yourself. You learn what not to do, how to do better, and how to create comfort through practice.
All television is an advertisement - that's why it exists. It wasn't the art-form first and then the commerce - it was that they could put on entertainment long enough to distract people into looking at products. It's for focusing people on advertising and separating you from money in some way. Some people forget that. The side product is that we get some great eye candy. TV is the best it has ever been right now. I don't have a problem with that since it's what keep us employed.
I have an amazing ability to forget.
The sun don't shine in your TV!
In Pakistan, many of the young people read novels because in the novels, not just my novels but the novels of many other Pakistani writers, they encounter ideas, notions, ways of thinking about the world, thinking about their society that are different. And fiction functions in a countercultural way as it does in America and certainly as it did in the, you know, '60s.
Somewhere in the archives of crudest instinct is recorded the truth that it is better to be endangered and free than captive and comfortable.