A Quote by Gus Van Sant

It's hard to speculate as a human about the afterlife because you're not in it. And it's probably as wild and wacky as you could imagine. The idea that people have figured it out, I'm not sure if I can fathom that.
I think you should enjoy this life that you are given on this earth because we really don't know what it is in the afterlife. We can definitely prove that this life is this life here because we wake up every day and do the same thing that we do. The afterlife I'm not so sure about. So, I don't understand why you'd want to hurt other people in thinking that you'll go on in the afterlife to have bliss. I just don't understand it.
I went to University after my A levels and did a degree in performing arts. It was only when I got there that I realized there were stage schools out there, and you had your union and your contacts and The Spotlight and this whole world of the acting industry that I had no idea about. So when I graduated, I took a year out and just thought really hard about whether it was something I knew enough about, and whether it was the career I could dedicate the rest of my wacky life to.
The afterlife I'm not so sure about. So, I don't understand why you'd want to hurt other people in thinking that you'll go on in the afterlife to have bliss. I just don't understand it.
This idea of universal access to basic healthcare has to be figured out as a world. No country has figured it out in part because it is driven by ideology.
God created the world; the laws of nature were created by God. True science tries to find out what God put in the world. The trouble is where scientists speculate about theology and they don't know what they're talking about because they weren't there. They can't speculate about the origins of life because they weren't there.
By delivering experience, novels can alter the stance we adopt toward news - not much, I'm sure, but they can make it a little more difficult for us to consign "other people" to our tidy boxes. Widening our imaginative life might - it's not hard to imagine - also develop our ability to contemplate counterfactuals and our capacity to speculate about how things might differ from how they're being represented.
Americans have a hard time writing moms. I'll get a script and everything's really great and well-drawn, but the mom is like stock footage, they go and get that out. They plug it in, this idea of "mother." You could lift moms out of any script, no matter what the culture, what the neighborhood, what the economic status, and you could switch them around, and they'd be the same person. I think it's because most people don't really have a human idea, a specific life that they attach to who their mother was. Their mother was there for them, so it either gets deified, or the opposite.
People, I thought, wanted security. They couldn't bear the idea of death being a big black nothing, couldn't bear the thought of their loved ones not existing, and couldn't even imagine themselves not existing. I finally decided that people believed in an afterlife because they couldn't bear not to.
I feel really - actually - quite terrified about the world as it now exists. The kind of sucking the world dry for a dollar seems to me to be even worse (though it was hard for me to imagine 30 years ago that it could get worse) and the idea that bling and profit over human beings is really more and more a credible idea; people don't even examine it with any kind of question: I find that really terrifying.
Also with that money comes the idea, "Let your imagination run wild." Which I think is a very dangerous thing. I think it's dangerous because you can get into pretty wacky territory. There are things that are too crazy.
I'm 17 years old. I'm not a straight-A student or anything. Even so, I figured out how to make an Internet that they can't wiretap. I figured out how to jam their person-tracking technology. I can turn innocent people into suspects and turn guilty people into innocents in their eyes. I could get metal onto an airplane or beat a no-fly list. I figured this stuff out by looking at the web and by thinking about it. If I can do it, terrorists can do it. They told us they took away our freedom to make us safe. Do you feel safe?
It's interesting to try to imagine how early humans discovered what was edible and what wasn't. Who figured out that when you cooked stinging nettles, the sting would go away completely? How many people had to die before the relative toxicity of wild mushrooms became widely known?
I made the rules I figured I could be the one to break them. I thought I would write about xenophobia, a hatred of foreigners. After I stated writing the story there was not a foreigner to be had. I did not want to just stick one in there so I could get a title out of it since it seemed like cheating. I never figured out how I could get out of this dilemma so I just called it X and weaved X traits into the story.
I figured out in my thirties it was about 'what can I contribute'? And what I figured out about that is creating something from scratch, and connecting it to people.
I like the idea of Wild Infancy, of people who have a deprived background, of starting out wild.
I think if I'm serious about affecting people with music, I have to affect people on a human to human level, not on a grand social idea or political idea, it has to be a human being idea so it has to be what's inside a human being.
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