All the religions of the world say God is the creator. If he is really the creator, then the only way to meet him will be to become a creator in some measure.
I like thinking of myself as invisible. I find it a very advantageous way to live.
The easiest time to be funny is during a fairly serious situation. That way you can break the ice.
I think, for me, I have to remember that I'm telling a story in some way.
It's much easier to conjure characters strictly from your imagination than to have to think about whether you're representing people in a truthful way.
If you see everything from the point of view of women being victims in some way, you don't see the wood for the trees. It is better to be a person than a woman.
Many an honest man practices upon himself an amount of deceit sufficient, if practised upon another, and in a little different way, to send him to the state prison.
But if we have the energy of compassion and loving kindness in us, the people around us will be influenced by our way of being and living.
I like the idea of going out with a woman and not doing anything, and just eating dinner and talking, and that's cool, too. So, someone might look at me and say, "No way, man. He's just banging strippers. " And I do that, but not all the time.
I think there is an immense charm and humanity about the Bollywood structure, probably in the way there was about Hollywood film in the '30s and '40s. Somehow they were less distracted about hardware, and more about production values and people, you know?
Plays are architecture, and you can make them stand in many ways that are hard to describe. And, I think, in our limited ability to describe them, we've substituted our inarticulateness for saying that there's one and only one structure.
Writing about a place is, of course, one good way of feeling close to it, feeling you have made something out of your interaction with that place. It's like a marker of your own experience, of that time in your life.
ISIS is not an organization that can destroy the United States. This is not a huge industrial power that can pose great risks to us, institutionally or in a systematic way. But they can hurt us. And they can hurt our people and our families.
We shall have to pass through many a valley, many a narrow defile. Many will grow tired on the way. Of course they will mostly be those who have no reason to do so.
Roxanne Quimby wanted money and power, and I was just a pillar on the way to that success.
Take on jobs, projects and challenges that frighten you. It's the best way to get rid of fear.
Because. . . Beacause it's so good, and there's only one chance to read a book for the first time, and I want it to last. That experience. I'd finish it in a day otherwise, and that'd be like. . . like eating a carton of ice cream in one sitting. Too much richness over too quickly. This way, I can draw it out. Make the book last longer. Savor it. I have to since they don't come out that often.
Not that anyone cares, but there's a right and wrong way to clean a house.
Trust is a careless pursuit at best. At worst, it's a good way to get yourself killed.
The intellectual tension that seems to work its way through this society almost like fat through meat is the tension between scientific reductionism and the deeply felt intuition of most people that there is a spiritual dimension, or a hidden dimension, or a transcendental dimension.