When people started reading me and talking to me about the work, they didn't say how funny, or how satiric, or how brilliant, or how this or how that, they said, how'd you get away with it? How'd you get that into print?
It is not nearly so important how well a message is received as how well it is sent. You cannot take responsibility for how well another accepts your truth; you can only ensure how well it is communicated. And by how well, I don't mean merely how clearly; I mean how lovingly, how compassionately, how sensitively, how courageously, and how completely.
How do you learn to pray? Well how do you learn to swim? Do you sit in a chair with your feet up drinking coke learning to swim? You get down and you struggle. That's how you learn to pray.
A lot of people think I had such a rosy career, but I wanted to identify that one of the things that helps you have a long career is learning how to deal with adversity, how to get past it. Once I learned how to get through that, others things didn't seem so hard.
I learned from my community how to shoot a gun, how to shoot it well. I learned how to make a damn good biscuit recipe. The trick, by the way, is frozen butter, not warm butter. But I didn't learn how to get ahead.
Everybody kind of has to learn the same lessons. You've got to learn how to get over your first love. You've got to learn how to forgive people that emotionally abuse you. You've got to learn how to let go in a lot of ways.
People always say, well, how do you get through show business? How do you swim the waters? And how do you survive and all that? I had a very solid method, and that is team up with ambitious partners.
The lesson you have to learn as novelist is how to be collaborative, and how to say, "I don't get to dictate this."
The more you get into any religion, it becomes the same. It really becomes how you treat other people and how you get outside yourself. How you look to help other people, and how you get out of this 'I, me, mine' type of thing.
How many young people among you are like this? You know how to give and yet you have ever learned how to receive. You still lack one thing. Become a beggar. This is what you still lack. Learn how to beg. This isn’t easy to understand. To learn how to beg. To learn how to receive with humility.
With me being in so many pain from when you have a betrayal from your best friend - who was my husband - and the girl got pregnant, I couldn't even get out of bed. The only thing that saved me was my stand-up. I would get on stage and just talk about stuff, and I made people laugh. A lot of women e-mail me and say, 'How do you smile? How do you laugh at something like this?' That's how I do it. I laugh because that's how I get through pain.
Without women to nurture in this world, how do - how do men get by? How do children get by? How does society get by at all?
It's one thing to work women into your talking points. It's another to tell them how you are going to educate their kids, how you are going to ensure they get health care, how we are going to rebuild infrastructure, how they are going to get equal pay.
Well, outside of the tone, the big thing that I gained from working on horror film was how to shoot really quickly with no money. I learned how to be able to go into a production and know exactly what shot I need to get and how the shot needs to look and what performance I need to get out of the talent at a very quick pace.
He had a lot of talent, but didn't have much dedication, wasn't organized, didn't know how to learn, didn't know how to comprehend what he was doing, didn't try to learn how to get better.
The American people I talk to don't spend every moment thinking, 'How can I tax my neighbor more than they're being taxed?' They say, 'How can I get a good job? How can my kids get good jobs? How can seniors have a confidence in their future when they know that Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid are bankrupt?'