A bad act done will fester and create in its own way. It's not only goodness that creates. Bad things create. They have their own yeast.
Christians can have doubts and they can have questions, and the unhealthy way to deal with that is to keep them inside where they fester and grow and can undermine our faith. The healthy way to deal with it is to talk about it and be honest about it.
I've found that festivals are a relatively painless way to meet people and make a few points that need making, without having to hit them over the head with too many speeches.
It's almost not safe to be an artist, the way everybody is randomly picking people to feud with.
So many of the fantasy stories I encountered growing up were set in worlds that were largely modelled on medieval Europe in one way or another. Lots of white folks in feudal societies, castles and kings, that kind of thing.
Anybody can reach anywhere from five to 15 million people weekly making a president look like an idiot, as I did back then, or Tina Fey did with Sarah Palin... You're always preaching to the choir one way or the other.
There are a couple of strategies for writing about an absence or writing about a loss. One can create the person that was lost, develop the character of the fiancee. There's another strategy that one can employ, maybe riskier... Make the reader suffer the loss of the character in a more literal way.
I'm inspired every day by the great captains of industry and enlightened entrepreneurs like my great-great-grandfather and founder of Fiat, Giovanni Agnelli, who personally knew all his workers and gave so much to this country, or Adriano Olivetti, unique and innovative in every way.
There is a new way with very very tiny fiber optics, which give an enormous high resolution. There are many many thousand fibers, very very close together with a very small diameter.
Because reading is a way of putting yourself in someone else's experience, especially reading fiction.
The two endorsements I'm most proud of come from Isabel Wilkerson and Toni Morrison. The latter is the greatest American fiction writer of our time, and the former is on her way to being the greatest American nonfiction writer of our time.
I'm a fiction writer, and fiction is telling the lives of unreal people. But the only way you can learn to do that well is by really understanding the lives of real people.
And then I met Jerry and he's such a creative fiction writer, and I don't know if there's ever been a team put together the way we are - where one person does the theological way out and suggestions, and the other person goes into the cave and does the fiction writing.
Of all the fictions we heard last week in Tampa, the one I find most troubling is this: If we all just go our own way, our nation will be stronger for it. Because if we sever the threads that connect us, the only people who will go far are those who are already ahead.
I play fictitious characters often solving fictitious problems. I believe mankind has looked at climate change in the same way, as if it were a fiction.
Anyone who wants simple, pat stories should buy another author's product. The real universe ain't that way, and neither are my fictive ones.
The way other kids would watch 'The Little Mermaid' or 'Sesame Street,' I would watch 'Fiddler on the Roof.'
The way to do fieldwork is never to come up for air until it is all over.
In 'Se7en' and 'Fight Club,' Fincher proved his suave mastery of film violence; in Zodiac, his way of clarifying the many clues in a murder thriller. As he showed in 'The Social Network,' the director also knows that no wound is more toxic than a friend's betrayal.
I was in a play directed by my father, and I was doing a fight scene, and the choreography went haywire, and I flew backward over a chair and ripped my thumb all the way to my wrist and had to have surgery to sew up all the tendons in there.
