Effective prayer is prayer that attains what it seeks. It is prayer that moves God, effecting its end.
One of my favorite modern American authors is Denis Johnson. I'm deeply inspired by all of his work - I rip him off constantly.
The idea of forever is kind of ridiculous, which is unfortunate because its kind of a nice thing to say, you know. I think it softens the blow of mortality and having to say goodbye to everything you know and everyone you love and all that kind of thing.
You can't manufacture inspiration, so a lot of it is still a waiting game for me. There's still a lot of mystery to songwriting. I don't have a method that I can go back to - they either come or they don't.
I'm kind of like, "never say never. "
When you write a song, the goal is not to convey the details of your life. You should write a memoir or something if that's what you're going to do.
When people have real faith in something, it's fascinating to me. And the fact that so many people, in surveys, so many people say they do. It kind of blows my mind.
For me writing and filmmaking is a therapeutic process. It reflects themes that I'm going through at a time in my life.
A transition from an author's book to his conversation is too often like an entrance into a large city, after a distant prospect. Remotely, we see nothing but spires of temples and turrets of palaces, and imagine it the residence of splendour, grandeur, and magnificence; but when we have passed the gates, we find it perplexed with narrow passages, disgraced with despicable cottages, embarrassed with obstructions, and clouded with smoke.
Congress actually authorized the printing and payment for a Bible. That illustrates the high regard that the Bible was held in early American society. We see biblical ideas woven into the founding documents of our country like the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. The Declaration of Independence explicity states "that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights. . . " This is a biblical idea stemming from the dignity of all people - Psalm 139:14 - we are fearfully and wonderfully made.
Problems cannot be solved by thinking within the framework in which the problems were created.