People who watch 'Fox News,' you may say, and this is anecdotal, but they are passionate about it. In the most unlikely places, like down in Soho where I used to live, people would come up to me and thank me for it. People I didn't know from a bar of soap. People appreciate that at least they're being heard. It is much more watchable.
This whole notion that all African-Americans are not going to vote for Obama is not necessarily true. I believe a third would vote for me, based on my own anecdotal feedback. Not vote for me because I'm black but because of my policies.
Art to me is an anecdote of the spirit, and the only means of making concrete the purpose of its varied quickness and stillness.
I don't know how to tell a joke. I never tell jokes. I can tell stories that happened to me... anecdotes. But never a joke.
I tell everyone I interact with what I'm working on and let them bring me anecdotes that illustrate my themes.
It's much better to wreak havoc on a show and be a maniac than promote myself. Plugs and anecdotes aren't really in line with my beliefs. Besides, if someone sees me on a morning show and thinks, 'That's not funny; this guy is crazy,' then I don't want them to come to the show anyway.
Having kids has proven to be this amazing - for me, this amazing source of ideas of anecdotes, of examples, I can test my own kids without human subject permission, so they pilot - I pilot my ideas on them. And so it is a tremendous advantage to have kids if you're going to be a developmental psychologist.
What is a nightstand without Mindy Kaling? I dip into her 'Why Not Me?' when I've had a particularly rough day. Her hilarious observations and anecdotes never fail to cheer me up.
A doctor in a hospital told me that when the mujaheddin were fighting in the early Nineties, he often performed amputations and Caesarean sections without anesthesia because there were no supplies.
I don't know where the idea originated that memoir writing is cathartic. For me, it's always felt like playing my own neurosurgeon, sans anesthesia. As a memoirist, you have to crack your head open and examine every uncomfortable thing in there.
I don't know where the idea originated that memoir writing is cathartic. For me, it's always felt like playing my own neurosurgeon, sans anesthesia.
When I was taken to the concentration camp of Auschwitz, a manuscript of mine ready for publication was confiscated. Certainly, my deep desire to write this manuscript anew helped me to survive the rigors of the camps I was in.
Ang Lee and 'Hulk,' for instance - a movie about a guy with different-colored skin and a lot of repressed rage? Sounds like the perfect film for an Asian, to me!
'Brokeback Mountain' just blew me away. I'll always remember talking to Heath Ledger just after he finished that movie and he was going on about working with Ang and how incredible he was.
I have more respect for a man who lets me know where he stands, even if he's wrong, than the one who comes up like an angel and is nothing but a devil.
No, I never saw an angel, but it is irrelevant whether I saw one or not. I feel their presence around me.
My mother told me one day I walked in to her and said, 'Mom, I'm not going to be sick anymore,' and she said 'Why?' and I said 'Because an angel told me so.' Now, I don't remember saying it; that's just what she told me.
Evolution was far more thrilling to me than the biblical account. Who would not rather be a rising ape than a falling angel? To my juvenile eyes, Darwin was proved true every day. It doesn't take much to make us flip back into monkeys again.
I think that someone is watching out for me, God, my guardian angel, I'm not sure who that is, but they really work hard.
Like most lit nerds, I'm a voracious reader. I never got enough poetry under my belt growing up but I do read it - some of my favorites, Gina Franco and Angela Shaw and Cornelius Eady and Kevin Young, remind me daily that unless the words sing and dance, what's the use of putting them down on paper.
