I want my thoughts to be an incentive for the reader to give his or her own thoughts. After I wrote 'Proust and the Squid,' I received truly hundreds of letters - I'm still receiving them - and the letters that I wrote back helped me formulate my thinking around things I know are important to others.
The tragedy of bold, forthright, industrious people is that they act so continuously without much thinking, that it becomes dry and empty.
I was thinking, too, of Superman and his fortress of solitude.
I went backwards and forwards over it until I was 22. And then in the past few years I began to say to myself, OK, look, I'm not messing around. This is something I want to attack, instead of thinking, I'll just see what happens with it.
I guess I'd like to be known for being an innovator, fostering creativity, thinking outside the box. You know, keeping people playful.
Foundations have to think outside the box and maybe expand past the usual suspects that get all of the funding and start thinking about how to reach into communities and support community healing on a more local level.
Insight enables you make sure you don't allow negative beliefs to get permanently set in your thinking - just the same way you wouldn't want fractured bones to be permanently set into place.
The moral landscape is the framework I use for thinking about questions of morality and human values in universal terms.
I don't think so much about verbal comedy. I always think about visual comedy. I was raised watching silents, and I'm always thinking about how to make cinema, not good talking - although I want good talking. I'm much more interested in framing, composition, and orchestration of bodies in space, and so forth.
You're thinking of Europe as Germany and France. I don't. I think that's old Europe.
I went to school at the San Francisco Art Institute, thinking I was going to become an art teacher. Within the first six months I was there, I was told that I couldn't be an art teacher unless I became an artist first.
I want to be the guy with the fresh new sound. I can remember as a kid thinking about a DJ going, 'Ladies and gentlemen, here's the new one from Frankie Ballard. He's the guy with that hot new sound.' That's the dream.
What I'm thinking about more and more these days is simply the importance of transparency, and Jefferson's saying that he'd rather have a free press without a government than a government without a free press.
I remember meeting President Obama and looking at him, thinking, 'Damn, this dude is really our president. He really went out and did it!' If you look at stories like that, and other stories that I'm sure you could compare to, it's just about freeing your mind and taking those guards down.
Hip-hop is the people. What the people are moving toward is what hip-hop is. I think people are moving toward a freer way of thinking. Openness.
Thinking of possibilities is like driving a car on a freeway. You have an open road that stretches endlessly before you where your thoughts are not shackled. But when we say 'impossible,' we have already reached a dead-end in our minds. So dwell on possibilities to open up your horizon.
One of my best friends had a tough time getting pregnant, and her situation had me really thinking about freezing my eggs.
I think when you're younger and you're watching people play on TV, you always say that you want to be at the French Open - you want to be playing Grand Slams. But then actually being there doing it, it kind of blows you away thinking, Wow, I actually used to think maybe I could do that one day, and now I'm actually doing it.
You are not thinking hard enough if you are sleeping well. And you would have to be unhinged to take on a subject like the French Revolution, or Rembrandt, and not feel some trepidation. There is always the possibility that you will crash and burn, and the whole thing will be a horrible, vulgar, self-indulgent mess.
People don't see very often their death coming... Look at the French Revolution: The king of France was thinking in the 1780s, 'We're doing rather better than my father in the 1770s.'
