[At age 92:] There are places I'd like to return to. But not as I was then but as I am now. 'Cause I'm trying to understand. And I've understood nothing.
I worked on 'Who Do You Love?' for, like, six months, really trying to, like - when I got it, I got it, but I was working on it for a minute cause I never had nothing to it. I couldn't get the flow or nothing. Then I just got it.
Who am I?” he whispered. “For years I pretended I was other than I was, and then I gloried that I might return to the truth of myself, only to find there is no truth to return to. I was an ordinary child, and then I was a not very good man, and now I do not know how to be either of those things any longer. I do not know what I am, and when Jem is gone, there will be no one to show me.
I am sure I would love to do it now, but back then, I was, like, 11 and it was 'ugh.' There's nothing sexual or sexy when you're that age. So I was kissing Brad Pitt. So what? He had chapped lips. He was lovely and kind and sweet to me, but it was just yuk.
I was born from nothing and to nothing I will return. And yet, when i say the word nothing, when i admit, at last, 'I am nothing,' i feel mysteriously like something again, ground zero, genesis, the pull of possibilities.
I think of L.A. as my home now, in large part because I became the entity that I am in L.A. I always say to people that my coming-of-age happened in L.A., the unraveling of the person I was pretending to be for a long time, and then finding of the person I feel like I now am.
Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more, so that we may fear less.
Now, you see, if you understand what I'm saying, with your intelligence, and then take the next step and say "But I understood it now, but I didn't feel it." Then, next I raise the question: Why do you want to feel it? You say: "I want something more", because that's again that spiritual greed. And you could only say that because you didn't understand it.
I am strong-willed, and I am driven, and I am passionate... but I don't have... a central cause... a motivating cause, I don't know what that would be... other than trying to tell the truth when I work.
One place understood helps us understand all places better
People believe I am what they see Me as, rather than what they do not see. But I am the Great Unseen, not what I cause Myself to be in any particular moment. In a sense, I am what I am not. It is from the Am-notness that I come, and to it I always return.
Everyone, he went on, speaks a language he does not understand, but which now and then is understood by others. That is enough to permit one to exist and at least to be misunderstood.
I am human. I am messy. I'm not trying to be an example. I am not trying to be perfect. I am not trying to say I have all the answers. I am not trying to say I'm right. I am just trying - trying to support what I believe in, trying to do some good in this world, trying to make some noise with my writing while also being myself.
That is what it is like with Pep. At first, you don't understand. But then you grow up, you work, and now we understand the things he wants much better. It's not like the first season when it took him more time to make us understand his ideas. Some players didn't understand immediately what he wanted.
I'm pretty sure my audience could be bigger, if I could get it out a lot more different places, but that's what we're working towards right now today. It ain't like I'm at the end of our career or nothing like that, I just now getting started. I been in the game for a long time but I'm just now getting heard by people everywhere else. And they still seem to like it, so it didn't give me nothing but fuel, and motivation to keep it pushing.
If, by chance, you were to meet me at the Casablanca airport or on a boat sailing from Tangiers, you would think me self-confident, but I am not. Even now, at my age, I am frightened when crossing borders because I am afraid of failing to understand strangers.
Read widely (in and outside of your own genre), keep a notebook with you at all times. Do something that scares you every now and then. Try to locate your own frequency, knowing that one year your voice is on AM 532 and the next it's on FM 92.8.