I didn't realize how interesting the place I come from is until I left home and saw how other cultures handled things differently.
I'm happy to be content-maker as well as curator, so I'm happy to also be a presenter for amazing things.
What should young people do with their lives today? Many things, obviously. But the most daring thing is to create stable communities in which the terrible disease of loneliness can be cured.
When you're curious, you find lots of interesting things to do.
Most students of literature can pick apart a metaphor or spot an ethnic stereotype, but not many of them can say things like: 'The poem's sardonic tone is curiously at odds with its plodding syntax.'
The poet, being an imitator like a painter or any other artist, must of necessity imitate one of three objects - things as they were or are, things as they are said or thought to be, or things as they ought to be. The vehicle of expression is language - either current terms or, it may be, rare words or metaphors.
The capacity for people to kid themselves is huge. Living on illusions or delusions, and the re-establishing of these illusions or delusions requires a big effort to keep them from being seen through. But a very old idea is at work behind our current state of affairs: enantiodromia, or the Greek notion of things turning into their opposite.
There's power in turning to the past to illuminate the current state of things.
In every house, when the curtains are drawn, there's a story going on, and you never get to hear... You get the public side of things, the happy, smiling, social activities.
We talk about theatre museums filled with old costumes and things. What we also need is a theatre museum of the old routines on videotape. We are only the custodians of those techniques, and they should be preserved.
The most important thing you can do is make the distinction between customer service and guest hospitality. You need both things to thrive, but they are completely different.
Things work in cycles.
Cynic, n: a blackguard whose faulty vision sees things as they are, not as they ought to be.
What's worse: a president who is very faithful to an ideology that you find extreme, or a president who is very cynical and appears to have no ideology at all? Neither one of those things is great.
It's almost impossible to reconcile the realities of how one feels during the day, hour by hour. But I approach things not cynically.
Give me a man who says this one thing I do, and not those fifty things I dabble in.
I have a real estate development company. I have investments in all sorts of things, and I dabble all over the place.
If I dabble in too many things and don't focus on channelizing my energy into one thing, I might mess it up.
'Homeland' is a thriller with a lot of cloak and dagger spy stuff, which is one of the things that makes it so much fun.
Nothing shows up the difference between the things said or read, so much as the daily experience of it.
