Show me a university which is a hotbed of thin-skinned offence-taking, where every unacceptable idea is policed and every person who happens to hold one is hounded out of a job, and I will show you a university that isn't a university but an ideological prison camp and indoctrination centre.
Any atrocity that's committed against one person affects us all, and we are becoming more of one society, of a global society, so something that happens in the Middle East or something that happens in Africa, something that happens in Asia, affects all of us.
The idea that everything is purposeful really changes the way you live. To think that everything that you do has a ripple effect, that every word that you speak, every action that you make affects other people and the planet.
Lord save us from off-handed, flabby-cheeked, brittle-boned, weak-kneed, thin-skinned, pliable, plastic, spineless, effeminate, ossified, three-karat Christianity.
Simply stated, testimony-real testimony, born of the Spirit and confirmed by the Holy Ghost-changes lives. It changes how you think and what you do. It changes what you say. It affects every priority you set and every choice you make.
Whatever happens happens. If something happens, something happens. But I believe in God, and I pray every day.
Every day of your life, you have information that enters your head, and that information informs your understanding of things, or shifts it, or changes it, or deepens it, or confuses you. Every day, every moment of every day - it's like this thing that happens.
I love poetry. It's at the heart of everything I do. Poetry transforms what we call language, and uses language as the stuff to become something else. I get spun around by what happens in words. When that occurs, it inspires images that seem so original to me as an artist, even though I'm following what the poem has offered.
I'll tell you what me scares me is plastic. Plastic bags and plastic bottles and these things. Why does my water have to be in a bloody plastic bottle? The landfill and the ocean. And I don't know, I'm just terrified with the proliferation of plastic.
Hotel tea is when you have to mix together a plastic envelope containing too much sugar, a small plastic pot of something which is not milk but has curdled anyway, and a thin brown packet seemingly containing the ashes of a cremated mole.
May I ask you something?" I say. "Why do you read books, when you could be outside, living a million different adventures every day?" "Because you can always count on a book to stay the same. EVerything else changes when you least expect it," she replies, bitter. "Families split apart, and nothing's forever. In books, you always know what's coming next. There are no surprises.
I'm only thin-skinned when somebody says bad things that are false. For instance, if you hit me about something that's true, all right, the bankruptcy - I used that as a tool. I didn't ever file for bankruptcy.
I remember people saying, "Believe me, everything in your life is going to change..." And I thought, "Why? That's such a bourgeois way of thinking." And then you have a child and yes, everything changes. It affects the way we live, what we do, and where we go - everything. And I wouldn't have in any other way.
Life is short, and if we enjoy every moment of every day, then we will be happy no matter what happens or what changes along the way.
I'm blessed and I thank God for every day for everything that happens for me.
I jog every day, but I haven't had plastic surgery - though that's not to say if one day I look in the mirror and go 'Ugh!' I won't have something done.