It's rather splendid to think of all those great men and women who appear to have presented symptoms that allow us to describe them as bipolar. Whether it's Hemingway, Van Gogh... Robert Schumann has been mentioned... Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath... some of them with rather grim ends.

I started getting fan notes from people saying, "Oh, keep up the mess-ups," and I'm thinking, "I'm not doing it deliberately. This is just who I am." But people thought it was funny. I guess if you're watching and you see that I could do it, maybe it gives hope that anybody can do it.

The quibble I have with President [Barack] Obama is,and I think some other people will have it, too is that the rhetoric is fine, and identifying the problem is fine. But it`s to use a football analogy, he sort of pushes it into the red zone, and then tends to settle for a field goal.

These are things I'd never seen before, they were very disturbing and they were very compelling to try and do something to change the situation for the animals. Farm animals are providing us with the food to stay alive, so I think we really owe them a decent life while they are alive.

I feel that women and men should free themselves up. It took me a while to get over my dysphoria about shopping in the men's section, trying on men's clothes, but when I was thinking about my life and the kind of woman I wanted to be, it was never just this by-the-book feminine thing.

I think all members of Congress are very concerned about the fact that, while we want to see our law enforcement agencies have every means they can possibly have to combat terrorism, we've got to remember that we've had a Constitution in place for 225 years, and it has served us well.

Death is not as terrible as you think. It comes to you as a healer. Sleep is nothing but a counterfeit death. What happens in death we can picture in sleep. All our sufferings vanish in sleep. When death comes, all our mortal tortures cease; they cannot go beyond the portals of death.

I think there is a misunderstanding about Indians' traditional views. India did send army into Goa, India did send an army into and fought a war in Kashmir in 1948, India did get Hyderabad by force... I think the narrow projection on the international... arena distorted India's image.

Look at those hedge funds - you think they can wait? They don't know how to wait! I have sat for years at a time with $10 to $12 million in treasuries or municipals, just waiting, waiting...As Jesse Livermore said, 'The big money is not in the buying and selling...but in the waiting.'

I'm beginning to think cookies is a code word for something else." "Maybe it is." He tugged on my bag again as he took a confident step back, forcing me down another step. "And just think about it. If cookie was a code word, whatever it symbolizes, it's been in your mouth, sweetheart.

I had to do this album. I tried thinking, "I'm not going to do it." But then I'm sitting there getting all suicidal and depressed, and I just start writing. It's like this inner drive. If I could choose, I would probably be living in the countryside and be fine with that, but I'm not.

Figure out who you are separate from your family, and the man or woman you're in a relationship with. Find who you are in this world and what you need to feel good alone. I think that's the most important thing in life. Find a sense of self because with that, you can do anything else.

If you've ever been in the West Wing, it's like a little rabbit warren. Everybody's crammed in there on top of each other, and you're eating breakfast, lunch, and dinner at the mess with people. And so you really get to know each other very well. So, I think they just weren't worried.

I never actually studied an American accent. I never learned it. I never had anybody teach me how to do it. It just kind of happened. I think I probably spent a lot of my childhood in front of my mirror pretending to do Cornflake commercials like the kids I've seen on TV from America.

WikiLeaks has been a very strong proponent of the Freedom of Information Act. This is probably, actually, if you think about it, probably against our interests as - as a publisher. But we believe that people have the right to know true information about what their government is doing.

Every time I go out on a stage I consider myself very lucky. Because, in a time where people are economically thinking about what to go and see - so, when I am on a stage, and it doesn't matter where I am, that's my favorite show. I come home after and say "That was my favorite show".

Many think Jesus came to earth so you and I can have a special kind of spiritual experience and then go merrily along, as long as we pray and read our Bibles and develop intimacy with the unseen God but ignore the others-oriented life of justice and love and peace that Jesus embodied.

I see the audience as the final collaborator. I think it's kind of bullshit when people say, "I'm not interested in the audience reaction." I'm like, "Then why do you do theater? You can write a book, then you don't have to see how the audience reacts." It's a living, breathing thing.

To be honest, I think love is complete bullshit. I don't think anyone ever loves anyone. I think the best people ever get is horny; horny and scared, so when they find someone who makes them horny, and they get too scared of the world outside, they stay together and they call it love.

For many, negative thinking is a habit, which over time, becomes an addiction... A lot of people suffer from this disease because negative thinking is addictive to each of the Big Three - the mind, the body, and the emotions. If one doesn't get you, the others are waiting in the wings.

I have zero desire, just so you know, to be in the limelight. I don't think it's good for the country to have a former president criticize his successor. You're not going to see me giving my opinions in the public arena, until I start selling my book. I'm going to emerge then submerge.

We learn by doing, not just by thinking. So I feel like beyond Buddhism, or Hinduism, or Judaism, or Christianity we need today to think about a global spirituality. We need to make it very personal and transformative for one self, and each other, together for those who are interested.

I give great thanks to God that he has created a Dalai Lama. Do you really think, as some have argued, that God will be saying: 'You know, that guy, the Dalai Lama, is not bad. What a pity he's not a Christian'? I don't think that is the case - because, you see, God is not a Christian.

I think that's why I coach.. I used to get up early every morning with a clear goal in mind of how fast I was going to be. When I stopped rowing, there was a void in my daily routine. Now I go to bed at night and get up morning with a clear goal in mind of how fast you are going to be.

It was a long road [trying to get pregnant a secong time]. I would go to the doctor in Beverly Hills every day at five in the morning to get tested to see if I was ovulating. I was trying everything: I did acupuncture and got a nutritionist to eat healthier, thinking that was an issue.

The story being told in 'Star Wars' is a classic one. Every few hundred years, the story is retold because we have a tendency to do the same things over and over again. Power corrupts, and when you're in charge, you start doing things that you think are right, but they're actually not.

Isn't it funny how babies laugh a lot? I read a toddler, a young child laughs 300 times a day. The average adult laughs, like, four times a day. God put it in them. He put the laugh in us, but I think sometimes we let life get us down, you know, have bad breaks, and we lose our breaks.

Personally, I don't see old economics and behavioural economics as opposed. It is useful to assume people are rational as a good approximation to their long term behaviour, but it would be unwise not to think how in practice their behaviour may deviate from that simplifying assumption.

If we are bold in our thinking, courageous in accepting new ideas, and willing to work with instead of against our land, we shall find in conservation farming an avenue to the greatest food production the world has ever known - not only for the war, but for the peace that is to follow.

I think, if anything, my children are the ones who have sacrificed because I've had to too many times be absent from them. But, at the same time, they have lived very enriched lives and probably experienced things they wouldn't have if not for the movements. So, there are some rewards.

I think first we have to begin by telling the truth, which I think has actually been a big stumbling block. We can look at Donald Trump and see how he lies, but I think we also have to look at some of the lies we've told ourselves and the lies we've accepted and internalized ourselves.

Atheism ... that bugbear of women and fools ... is the very top and perfection of free-thinking. It is the grand arcanum to which a true genius naturally riseth, by a certain climax or gradation of thought, and without which he can never possess his soul in absolute liberty and repose.

When I did Sean Penn’s movie, I think I was living in, like, a $500-a-month room, and someone called me up or bumped into me and asked me if I’d come up to work for a day. That sort of got me going a little bit. But it wasn’t until Sin City [2005] that I kind of got back into the game.

I think human beings must have faith or must look for faith, otherwise our life is empty, empty. To live and not to know why the cranes fly, why children are born, why there are stars in the sky. You must know why you are alive, or else everything is nonsense, just blowing in the wind.

I find it very sad that so many girls who look up to me are young women of color who have been told that they are ugly, and who feel that they are not normal...I think it's so important that women look like me find that they can be beautiful or objects of love, attention and affection.

The word 'however' is like an imp coiled beneath your chair. It induces ink to form words you have not yet seen, and lines to march across the page and overshoot the margin. There are no endings. If you think so you are deceived as to their nature. They are all beginnings. Here is one.

Turning a human being into a thing, an object, is almost always the first step towards justifying violence against that person. It is very difficult, perhaps impossible, to be violent to someone we think of as an equal, someone we have empathy with, but it is very easy to abuse a thing

I'm asking the reader to suspend reality with me and entertain the idea that the person writing is not me. In order to do that well, I think, one needs to point out the artifice of the narrative. Somehow if the narrator is self-aware then it's almost more humanizing and more relatable.

So I've seen life as one long learning process. And if I see - you know, if I fly on somebody else's airline and find the experience is not a pleasant one, which it wasn't in - 21 years ago, then I'd think, well, you know, maybe I can create the kind of airline that I'd like to fly on.

I think by all accounts in the same way we look back on the anti-Catholic and anti-Jewish sentiments of our history with shame and derision and with a healthy dose of mockery, that's how we will very likely look back on this sort of anti-Muslim sentiment as well in the next generation.

I think that there should be options available, quite early on, that if someone is recognised as a disruptive child, for them to be trained vocationally. Maybe if those kids were given the option to learn how to contribute to society on a practical level they wouldn't get into trouble.

Thinking should be like musical meditation. Has any philosopher pursued a thought to its limits the way Bach or Beethoven develop and exhaust a musical theme? Even after having read the most profound thinkers, one still feels the need to begin anew. Only music gives definitive answers.

Before tomorrow, make a list of your traits. Make YOUR list - who you are and why. Then ask yourself this question: where did it come from? Are you the way you are because it is what you want... or what they want? Are you a product of your imagination or someone else's? Think about it.

In the global millennium goals, we're on track to beat and eliminate severe poverty. So there are lots of positive trends. I think the world in 25 years could be a much better version of the world we have today. But the role of humans would still be fundamentally at the center of that.

Well, I think a handshake is something that honorable men do. Before we had contracts we had handshakes that expressed that we were making an arrangement that was based on our honor. And I don't think I can shake the hand of someone who shows and lacks honor by attacking a man's faith.

Is it possible to have an endless series of successes without falling on our faces? I suppose it is, but I think it would entail doing the same things over and over again without taking chances, without taking risks or exploring our limits, without finding out what we can and can't do.

I have no desire to be president of the United States. Zero desire. I don't think that I would be electable. And there are far too many people that are far smarter than me to be president. I'd like to find one with some honor and integrity. I haven't seen them yet, but they'll show up.

It's pretty easy to think of the idea of a story, and maybe even to write a scene or two, but understanding the ebb and flow of a narrative, where to leave the little clues your protagonist (and reader) need, while playing fair, takes a lot more skill and patience than you might think.

"Where there is a will there is a way" is an old true saying. He who resolves upon doing a thing, by that very resolution often scales the barriers to it and secures its achievement. To think we are able is almost to be so - to determine upon attainment is frequently attainment itself.

The crow doth sing as sweetly as the lark When neither is attended; and I think The nightingale, if she should sing by day When every goose is cackling, would be thought No better a musician than the wren. How many thing by season seasoned are To their right praise and true perfection!

Share This Page