The existence of God, the why of life, was all that really only a question of glands?
Motivations are too tangled and complex.
I much prefer working with kids whose life could be completely upended by a reading of a book over a weekend. You give them a book to read - they go home and come back a changed person. And that is so much more interesting and exciting.
It was strange to stand there in front of the mirror and see myself like I was my own best friend, a kid wanted to hang with forever. This was a boy I could travel to the seacoasts with, a boy I'd like to meet up with in foreign cities like Calcutta and London and Brazil, a boy I could trust who also had a good sense of humor and liked smoked oysters from a can and good weed and the occasional 40 ounces of malt. If I was going to be alone for the rest of my life this was the person I wanted to be alone with.
But really, it was reading that led me to writing. And in particular, reading the American classics like Twain who taught me at an early age that ordinary lives of ordinary people can be made into high art.
I am aware of the changes, but in no sense am I believer that we live in a post-racial society. That's a description of our inheritance and that is theirs, which is inescapable. It is doesn't matter if you are from New England or Mississippi. You're an American. It doesn't matter if you are white, black, brown, or Asian. It is part of American society. You'd have to be blind, deaf, or dumb not to know it. The emphasis on color or the fear of it, is all part of the same dark flower. I am trying to point to that and to bring it all the way back from Senegal.
If you dedicate your attention to discipline in your life you become smarter while you are writing than while you are hanging out with your pals or in any other line of work.
The greatest threat to women (and by extension humanity) is the growth and acceptance of a misogynistic, authoritarian, and violent culture of militarism.
Our lives are the results of our choices. To blame and accuse other people, the environment, or other extrinsic factors is to choose to empower those things to control us.
exemplar, n. It's always something we have to negotiate- the face that my parents are happy, and yours have never been. I have something to live up to, and if I fail, I still have a family to welcome me home. You have a storyline to rewrite, and a lack of faith that it can ever be done. You love my parents, I know. But you never get too close. You never truly believe there aren't bad secrets underneath.
Punishment is a vital need of the human soul.