It's exhausting, the energy it takes to unknow a truth.
The secret to life is to put yourself in the right lighting.
Love is essential, gregariousness is optional.
Solve problems, make art, think deeply.
The glory of the disposition that stops to consider stimuli rather than rushing to engage with them is its long association with intellectual and artistic achievement. Neither E=mc2 nor Paradise Lost was dashed off by a party animal.
Schwartz's research suggests something important: we can stretch our personalities, but only up to a point. Our inborn temperaments influence us, regardless of the lives we lead. A sizeable part of who we are is ordained by our genes, by our brains, by our nervous systems. And yet the elasticity that Schwartz found in some of the high-reactive teens also suggests the converse: we have free will and can use it to shape our personalities.
Solitude matters. And for some people it's the air they breathe.
I thought maybe a day was coming when I'd stop constantly worrying about how to live. Maybe at some point I'd just start living, no questions asked.
So when you're talking about lyrics in the context of music, it's not just about what the words mean, and what you were thinking about when you wrote it. It's not cognitive in that same way. It's almost like music turns words into touch, which is hard to describe, like the feeling of your shirt on your back. It's a pretty delicate thing to try to put into words. You just feel it.
I don't smoke a lot of pot anymore. No one wants to hang around a guy who ends every sentence with, "Do you guys hate me?"
I love actors. I enjoy their company, and I get excited each and every time they bring a character I've written to life. Every so often a talented actor doesn't hook in correctly to a character; or someone gets lost in a labyrinth of over-complicated thoughts, and the character and play suffer. However, most of the time I find actors either end up doing exactly what was in my head, or sometimes do something even better.