I actually think I have an audience member's sensibility about going to the movies.
If you understand writing as primarily engaging an imaginary reader, well, you've kind of been doing that your whole life. You walk into a room and you're engaging with imaginary strangers because you don't actually know who they are. For me, it was really empowering to say: this is a branch of entertainment and communication and engagement, as opposed to jumping over some perceived literary high bar. That was the buzzkill.
I'm enormously interested in freedom and retaining the right to have whatever economy we want and to shape it as we want and a having sufficient Democracy so that the people actually hold their Government in their own hands.
No woman will ever satisfy me. I know that now, and I would never try to deny it. But this is actually okay, because I will never satisfy a woman, either. Should I be writing such thoughts? Perhaps not. Perhaps it’s a bad idea. I can definitely foresee a scenario where that first paragraph could come back to haunt me, especially if I somehow became marginally famous.
I like to take on the thing I don't like at the moment. I like to find something that looks wrong or feels off, something that I would never have done in the past, like brocade. And then all of a sudden, if we can make brocade work, then we've really done something, because I hate it. And that's just a reference. I don't actually hate brocade.
To pretend, I actually do the thing: I have therefore only pretended to pretend.
Real music lovers are actually my favourite kind of people because they like to know, rather than just be told what to think.
Sometimes when you write something on the page, it can seem very funny, but when you act it out - and this happens to me a lot, actually - the melancholy of the situation becomes more front and center.
If you have to run away from something that used to be an idol, you're actually still enslaved by it. It's still controlling you.
Ninety percent of those who fail are not actually defeated; they simply quit. . . . As you face bad experiences, it's important for you to remember that you can rarely see the benefits while you're in the midst of them. You usually gain perspective on the other side of it.
We did such a great job of creating the interstate highway system in Oklahoma City that we don't have traffic congestion. You can actually get a speeding ticket during rush hour in the city. That's how great our traffic flows.
Michelle Malkin is the most vile, hateful commentator I've ever met in my life. She actually believes that neighbors should start snitching out neighbors, and we should be deporting people. It's good she's in D. C. and I'm in New York. I'd spit on her if I saw her.
I wonder why we always deny love. I remember in middle school, if you were accused of the crime of loving, you screamed denials constantly and stopped ever even looking at the boy you were accused of liking. The boys could destroy each other by yodeling, "An-drew lo-oves Jen-nie," and both Andrew and Jennie would flinch and blush. Love is this great thing that most songs and books and poems and lives are all about. So the minute we actually think there might be love around, we start laughing and pretending and hiding from it.
If I'm happy with the song and it's a hit song or not, for the rest of my life, I can hang my hat on knowing I did the best I could, and I'll enjoy getting out there and doing it. That's all that really matters for me. The icing on the cake is people actually enjoy it and sing it back to you. That's when you know that you've done something great.
Going to college was never an option. I was passionate about music, but how much talent I actually had was another matter.
I think that clearly it has an influence, to be coming of age during the punk rock era, to come from a difficult and sporadically violent background, to have been in and out of such chaos, I think it actually helps. But I don't know for sure.
A person’s life story is equal to what they have plus what they want most in the world, minus what they’re actually willing to sacrifice for it.
You can lie to yourself and fool yourself and rationalize that the choice you're making is what is right and what is true and what leads to liberation, when it's actually only the fulfillment of desire.
To be equitable, economic growth has to be sustainable. To be sustainable, economic growth has in turn to be all-inclusive. All-inclusive is no longer the greatest good of the greatest number. It is actually Sarvodaya or the rise of all. This Mahatma Gandhi saw as essential to Satyagraha itself.
I don’t actually take much stock in the collapsing culture bit. I’m beginning to see it instead as the conduct of life without input from your soul.