To this day, I can never shake the connection between this boy, Peeta Mellark, and the bread that gave me hope, and the dandelion that reminded me that I was not doomed.
The bad-boy label is just an assumption.
The mentality and behavior of drug addicts and alcoholics is wholly irrational until you understand that they are completely powerless over their addiction and unless they have structured help, they have no hope.
I've never had a sustained period of medication for mental illness when I've not been on other drugs as well. It's just not something that I particularly feel I need. I know that I have dramatically changing moods, and I know sometimes I feel really depressed, but I think that's just life. I don't think of it as, "Ah, this is mental illness," more as, "Today, life makes me feel very sad. " I know I also get unnaturally high levels of energy and quickness of thought, but I'm able to utilize that.
I enjoyed having a reputation as being wild, but these days I try not to worry about what people think in the privacy of their own brain or what they write in the bizarre publicity of their own newspapers, because all of those things are meaningless.
Of all the consumer products, chewing gum is perhaps the most ridiculous: it literally has no nourishment – you just chew it to give yourself something to do with your stupid idiot Western mouth. Half the world is starving, and the other’s going, ‘I don’t actually need any nutrition, but it would be good to masticate, just to keep my mind off things.
Marketing is all pervasive. They're getting marketed products they can't afford - can't ever hope to acquire. They believe the only way they're ever going to achieve happiness is the acquisition of these products. Products they can't afford. They see people living that lifestyle, and they have that lifestyle beamed incessantly into their minds through media, which you know I participate in.
The truth of religion comes from its symbolic rendering of man's moral experience; it proceeds intuitively and imaginatively. Its falsehood comes from its attempt to substitute itself for science and to pretend that its poetic statements are information about reality.
I spend a lot more time than any person should have to talking with lawyers and thinking about intellectual property issues.
Our essential nature is one of pure potentiality.
Paradoxical as it may seem, God means not only to make us good, but to make us also happy, by sickness, disaster and disappointment.