I'm not an example for how people should live their lives. Never in my life would I ever set out to be an example for people on how to live their lives. If you need an example for how to live, then you just shouldn't have been born. Straight up.
"Understand the process of the ego. How does the ego live? The ego lives in the tension between what you are and what you want to be. A wants to be B - the ego is created out of this very tension. How does the ego die? The ego dies by you accepting what you are. That you say, "I am fine as I am, where I am is good. I will remain just as existence keeps me. Its will is my will."
Your life is yours to live, no matter how you choose to live it. When you do not think about how you intend to live it, it lives you. When you occupy it, step into it consciously, you live it.
My school is the world, and my teacher is the people. It is very important not to stay cloistered in the office if you want to create. We have to go out in society to understand how people live and dress in their real lives.
It's the hardest thing in the world to be in a business where it's all about people accepting you, and you have a desperate need to be accepted, and yet you live in a, you operate in a society that's now very unaccepting.
I'm trying to have no regrets. I'm starting to learn about myself and how to live. As an actor, part of the job is accepting your life and learning how to roll with it. I want to live a life where I don't regret any decisions, and if I do, I learn from them.
The abundance of our lives is not determined by how long we live, but how well we live. Christ makes abundant life possible if we choose to live it now.
When you're starting out as an actor people are very interested in who you are because they want to know where they can put you. And quite often, and we're all guilty of this is our lives, we judge very quickly and we pigeon-hole people very quickly based on how they look and how they talk and how they dress and we think: "Oh yeah, we know who you are."
For me, what is political is very personal. Politics are not this abstract idea. Laws are the rules that dictate how we live our lives. What we eat is political. How we dress is political. Where we live is political. All of these things are influenced by political decision-making, and it's important to be part of the process.
I think the point about ActionAid is what it's asking people to do is engage with poor people in developing countries and understand what their lives are like and understand how the way we live our lives impacts on theirs.
There are a lot of singers who cannot sing to save their lives. We have to accept it, but thank God there is such a thing as live shows. It's only when people are faced with live shows that the world gets to know how good or how bad they are.
But how to know the falsity of death? How can we know there is no death? Until we know that, our fear of death will not go either. Until we know the falsity of death, our lives will remain false. As long as there is fear of death, there cannot be authentic life. As long as we tremble with the fear of death, we cannot summon the capacity to live our lives. One can live only when the shadow of death has disappeared forever. How can a frightened and trembling mind live? And when death seems to be approaching every second, how is it possible to live? How can we live?
I used to read more when I was a kid than I do now. It was all sort of fuel for the fire to teach you how to think and how to make things and it informed the architecture that I was doing. It's better coming in with that history and that kind of knowledge and depth of understanding of humanity that is very important for building buildings - for understanding people and how they should live and how you could make your lives better and stuff like that.
The good thing about New Orleans is that, overall, it's an accepting place. It's accepting of eccentricity, it's accepting of excess, it's accepting of color, in the sense of culture, not necessarily in the sense of race.
The way that you eliminate bad and ugly is either through activism and policy making that never tolerates evil -- instead of the liberal politically correct policy of accepting evil and accepting other points of views that destroy lives. We the thoughtful, productive people of American have got to take our freedom back.
Every single day, I get letters - very moving, overwhelming letters - testifying how much my books have meant to people in times of crisis in their lives, when they were very ill, say. If I ever doubted that writing could play an important part in people's lives, I don't doubt that now.