Comedy appeals to the collective mind of the audience and this grows fatigued; while farce appeals to a more robust organ, their collective belly.
A certain feeling comes from throwing your good life away, and it is one part rapture.
Poetry feels like a country I visit without a passport, where I look around furtively, grab hold of something precious, and try to smuggle it back across the border. Any poem I get written down feels like contraband to me.
It's what you do that makes your soul.
the conspicuous consumption of limited resources has yet to be accepted widely as a spiritual error, or even bad manners
Will you explain to me why people encourage delusional behaviour in children, and medicate it in adults?
When I look out the window, I exhale a prayer of thanks for the color green, for my children's safety, for the simple acts of faith like planting a garden that helped see us through another spring, another summer. And I inhale some kind of promise to protect my kids' hopes and good intentions we began with in this country. Freedom of speech, the protection of diversity - these are the most important ingredients of American civil life and my own survival. If I ever took them for granted, I don't know.
Sanitised violence in movies has been accepted for years. What seems to upset everybody now is the showing of the consequences of violence.
I have this idealistic and maybe naive thought that almost any song can be anything. If you record one song today, it would maybe be exciting and cool. But I could record the same song next week and it would be something completely different.
The way I see it," she continued, "is that some things are just meant to be the way they are.
If certain acts of violation of treaties are crimes, they are crimes whether the United States does them or whether Germany does them, and we are not prepared to lay down a rule of criminal conduct against others which we would not be willing to have invoked against us.