The head learns new things, but the heart forever practices old experiences.
Yet higher religion, which is only a search for a larger life, is essentially experience and recognized the necessity of experience as its foundation long before science learnt to do so.
A novel usually begins, in my experience, with a thought or image that won't leave me alone.
The experience of being a mixed person is all over the place - one of my best friends is Chinese and Italian; my other best friend is Lebanese and Trinidadian. The mix of heritage, culture or identity is something that our country is built on.
I got to go to practice one day, shoot around, and rebound for LeBron James. That was still an unreal experience.
I had been a Maoist, and then when the Gang of Four was overthrown, I was completely distraught. I was bedridden for three weeks; it was a very painful experience for me. Not only because I had been wrong, but because I felt really embarrassed that I had been lecturing and pontificating with such self-confidence.
I was at Leeds Carnegie, the ninth tier. And I was coaching students. There would have been hundreds of managers with more experience. So I had to go to the fourth tier of Swedish football, pretty much in the Arctic circle.
Wiffle ball was my first experience hitting left-handed.
In my experience as an actor over so many years, I don't know when I have been touched so deeply on so many levels as I have been by 'The Leftovers' in my three years there. It is a profound exploration of life, of grief, of loss.
I often draw from people in my own experience to base a character on, going back to my days with Mike Leigh.
I'm definitely of the 'less is more' mentality, and what I really appreciate is that fragrance is chemical, and it changes with your body throughout the day. It's a very deeply personal thing. One smell on one person isn't the same on another, and I appreciate the uniqueness of that experience.
I have to write what I can write, and writing the text of a picture book is like walking a tightrope, if you ramble off... As my friend Julius Lester says, 'A picture book is the essence of an experience.'
I always knew that it was going to be an uphill climb to replace Letterman from complete obscurity with no experience, but I think I had to go through it to know exactly what a titanic effort that was going to be.
Better than anything else in our culture, it enables fathers and sons to speak on a level playing field while building up from within a personal history of shared experience - a group history - that may be tapped into at will in years to come.
Again and again, Primo Levi's work is described as indispensable, essential, necessary. None of those terms overstate the case, but they do prepare readers new to Levi for a forbiddingly educative experience, making him a writer unlike all others and the experience of reading him a chore. Which it isn't.
In my experience sometimes the darker the material that you're doing, the more necessary it is to have some sort of levity around. I've worked on more lighthearted pieces that have been more brutal and tougher to make.
I wanted to go to a liberal arts college, I wanted to have that experience.
People who come out of the liberal arts don't have an understanding of science and technology, and the people in science and technology have very little experience with liberal arts and the traditions of a liberal democracy.
I never viewed technology as a replacement for the human experience. I viewed it as something that could liberate the human experience.
Maturity and experience are part of my liberation.
