Governments don't control people like they used to.
Well, clearly, for me in the immediate future, it is grappling, like so many other governors are grappling, with the economic woes of these states. We were all hoping to see some federal relief.
I'm quite shy, really. The figure you see on TV, that's just a persona. I like getting home, putting my feet up, getting into my slippers and dressing gown.
I feel like I just grabbed a big juicy worm with a right sharp hook in the middle of it.
I was singing in a mall, and I picked a girl to come up onstage with me. As I was grabbing her hand, I fell off the stage. It felt like I was in the air forever, flying like Superman.
I like to think of sales as the ability to gracefully persuade, not manipulate, a person or persons into a win-win situation.
There is really only one way to deal with Misery. Accept her presence. Like most experiences in life, we must acknowledge the passage gracefully and let her move through our lives because she brings with her a hidden gift.
There was a time, after I earned my graduate degree and before I sold my first novel, when it looked like I might have to get an office job.
People seem comfortable with me. And maybe that's got a lot to do with shows like Graham Norton. You just tell it like it is on those programs.
When I get asked about novelists I like, they tend to be white, male, and British, like Graham Greene. They write the kind of declarative sentences I like. I don't like to be deflected by acrobatics.
Certainly, my exposure in high school to writers like Flannery O'Connor, Shusaku Endo, Fyodor Dostoevsky and Graham Greene was formative.
Innovation, like creativity, is an amorphous concept. It's the holy grail of business, but achieving it - even merely explaining it - is lightning-in-a-bottle difficult.
Like everything metaphysical the harmony between thought and reality is to be found in the grammar of the language.
I had someone correct my grammar once on a blind date, and within the first 10 minutes the date was over. You just don't correct somebody's grammar. That's just not okay. I'm from Tennessee, so I probably say everything wrong. I might have said 'ain't,' or something like that.
Going to a grammar school, you mixed with all sorts of different types and I used to listen to how they talked. When I did my imitations, I could sound like someone really rough, or I could sound like a cabinet minister.
I like all things grammatical, and I had already written several books about parts of speech, and even the alphabet, so everything that makes up a sentence and even a word was covered except for punctuation.
When I won the first Grammy, there was no other feeling like that feeling. It just made me feel like I came so far, like that was just a dream a few years before that, and then it was happening right then.
Why don't the Grammys matter? Because it feels rigged and cheap - like a popularity contest that the insiders club has decided.
The world is like a grand staircase, some are going up and some are going down.
I'd like to see more of Colorado, Utah, and maybe go to Yellowstone. Oh, and I'd like to kayak down the Colorado through the Grand Canyon.
