For me, growing up and going to school and not seeing any anti-bullying posters and not hearing people talk about bullying was very desolate.
A week of sweeping fogs has passed over and given me a strange sense of exile and desolation. I walk round the island nearly every day, yet I can see nothing anywhere but a mass of wet rock, a strip of surf, and then a tumult of waves.
After I made 'A Crow Looked at Me,' I remember people saying things to me like, 'You've made a beautiful tribute to Genevieve.' And I felt like, no! No no no, I haven't. I made a tribute to my own destruction and desolation. This is not a portrait of her. That's not who she was. She wasn't just a person who died.
I felt deep within me that the highest point a man can attain is not Knowledge or Virtue or Goodness or Victory but something even greater, more heroic and more despairing: Sacred Awe!
If I place love above everything, it is because for me it is the most desperate, the most despairing state of affairs imaginable.
Mum's serial misbehavior over the years had driven me, despairing, to write her scolding - occasionally scalding letters.
How thin and insecure is that little beach of white sand we call consciousness. I've always known that in my writing it is the dark troubled sea of which I know nothing, save its presence, that carried me. I've always felt that creating was a fearless and a timid, a despairing and hopeful, launching out into that unknown.
For me, there is a paradox in poetry, which is like the paradox in tragedy. You have the most terrible subject, but it's in a form that is so sensually gratifying that it connects the surviving heart to the despairing intellect.
I don't like the clean-shaven boy with the necktie and the good job. I like desperate men, men with broken teeth and broken minds and broken ways. They interest me. They are full of surprises and explosions.
All my pictures are built around the idea of getting in trouble and so giving me the chance to be desperately serious in my attempt to appear as a normal little gentleman.
In my early years, I was much too ignorant and didn't realize how desperately important it all is, how really important the lyrics are. And for me as a singer, I am a lady who takes the lyrics first.
I think people are used to seeing actors be wide open and desperately giving of themselves, and while I do that on a movie set as much as I can, it's so unnatural for me to do it on television, in interviews, in anything like that. I also don't find that my process as an actor is really anyone else's business.
Shoot, man, I loved being a damn heel. Something about that, just going out there and being the most despicable person you could ever be, was a real turn-on for me. And I grew up a real shy kid in south Texas, and it was something for me to lean on and have fun with.
Just as people behave to me, so do I behave to them. When I see that a person despises me and treats me with contempt, I can be as proud as any peacock.
Nobody despises to lose more than I do. That's got me into trouble over the years, but it also made a man of mediocre ability into a pretty good coach.
I do not want history to record me as someone who has bequeathed to his nation the institution of despotism.
I grew up always having dessert after dinner. Always. It's such a hard habit for me to break. It's fine to have dessert every once in a while, but not seven days a week!
I'll immediately gain, like, 5 pounds even just by thinking about cutting out dessert. It's a nightmare. I decided, for me, the healthiest thing was to eat what I want and just exercise. Some women can watch what they eat, but I just can't do that.
Well look, I mean, I think that prayer and holy water, and things like that are all fine. They don't do any good, but they don't necessarily do any harm. It's touching to be thought of in that way. It makes up for those who tell me that I've got my just desserts.
Anytime there was an award show, it was a ritual where me and my mom would sit around and watch with my friends. We would make desserts and buy chips and popcorn and see what our favorite performances of the night were.
