I wanted to do journalism, as I was an idealist. Then, in my second year of journalism, I realized that in real life, things don't work the way you expect them to. I realized that I could express my ideas better through films.
Women are treated as unjustly in poetry as in life. The feminine ones are not idealistic, and the idealistic not feminine.
I've got a lot of experience under my belt, but I still have a very naive and idealistic outlook on life.
The idealists dream and the dream is told, and the practical men listen and ponder and bring back the truth and apply it to human life, and progress and growth and higher human ideals come into being and so the world moves ever on.
In our culture, many of us idealize love. We see it as some lofty cure-all for all of life's problems. Our movies and our stories and our history all celebrate it as life's ultimate goal, the final solution for all of our pain and struggle. And because we idealize love, we overestimate it. As a result, our relationships pay a price.
I try to be as optimistic as I can. I feel like that's the beautiful thing about art and music. It can take you places, and they can be a positive influence. A very soothing influence. Honestly, I feel like there's enough pain and terrible things that happen in life. That's beautiful thing in art, you can really idealize things.
Why be in music, why write songs, if you can't use them to explore life or an idealized vision of life? I believe a lot of our lives are spent asleep, and what I've been trying to do is hold on to those moments when a little spark cuts through the fog and nudges you.
Because I don't think it's very healthy to hold people to idealized views. I think that's a certain stage in life, something kids do. You have to go through that idealistic phase with your parents, but at a certain point, you need to see people as just people.
You can't believe everything you read in a newspaper or everything that's coming out of the president's mouth. And you can't believe when someone posts a picture from their personal life, because most of the time, it's staged - we're showing each other these idealized versions of ourselves so that we seem better and other people will feel worse.
My life feels, week to week, incomplete to the level of being pointless if I am not in preparation for the next play or, ideally, into it.
The fact that I spent my life in universities in a manner that I no longer have close identification with bricklayers is a pain to me.
When it comes to inmates, we have boiled them down to just the few things we know about them - their crime, their current life situation, their identification number. But the reality is they were something before they were their crime.
I think that not only do saints make poor role models, they are incapable in one sense of identifying radically with those of us who are mere mortals. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s mortality says to us that here's a figure who got up every day of his life facing tremendous odds and yet overcame them.
As someone who has spent much of my life identifying as a conservative, I can't stand what American conservatism has become.
High bankruptcy rates, increased credit card debt, and identity theft make it imperative that all of us take an active role in providing financial and economic education during all stages of one's life.
People want leaders. Not ideologues. Not people whose life experiences have been so narrow that they've been able to maintain the purity of their youthful ideals. Not people whose principal contact with political life comes in the form of speeches and sound bites rather than decisions and responsibilities.
The great accomplishment of Jobs's life is how effectively he put his idiosyncrasies - his petulance, his narcissism, and his rudeness - in the service of perfection.
George Saunders is the funniest. He makes me laugh in the way I want to laugh - with so much empathy and deep understanding of people. He illuminates things and people I've never thought about - and I've dedicated my life to the study of people and their idiosyncrasies. He is light years ahead.
Reading, solitude, idleness, a soft and sedentary life, intercourse with women and young people, these are perilous paths for a young man, and these lead him constantly into danger.
Communities and neighborhoods are affected. Idling trains, traffic backups, grade crossing accidents and other safety issues all affect the quality of life in our neighborhoods.
