As long as you as an individual... can convince yourself that in order to move forward as best you can you have to be optimistic, you can be described as 'one of the faithful,' one of those people who can say, 'Well, look, something's going to happen! Let's just keep trying. Let's not give up.
Don't be so hard on yourself. Make something simple a few times until you 'master' it and move on to the next thing. Take a cooking class! Buy a cookbook that specializes in foods or a cuisine you enjoy.
I'm so glad I'm not a dentist. How many times does someone say, 'Oh, Doc, it felt so good when you were drilling my teeth'? Never. But when you give someone a wonderful cookie, you put a little of yourself in, and you see someone's face light up - that's immediate approval.
Don't expect too much from yourself. What I like to do when I have a day off is make various cookie doughs and freeze them. Then I always have that on hand if I need it.
When people tell me they are going to go scrapbooking, I say, 'Why don't you make it yourself.' It's like chocolate-chip cookies. People buy the cookie-dough roll and slice it, and then they lay it on a cookie sheet. That's not making chocolate-chip cookies.
The coolest toys don't have to be bought; they can be built. In fact, sometimes the only way they'll ever exist is if you make them yourself.
Through improvisation, jazz teaches you about yourself. And through swing, it teaches you that other people are individuals too. It teaches you how to coordinate with them.
The big cop-out would be to accept popularity rather than opting to try to create potent work. It's so easy to do the popular thing, the expected thing, and that's where you start to cheat yourself - and your fans, in the end - because there's an inherent dishonesty in pandering and dishing up what everyone's expecting.
You got to be able to reinvent yourself and come up with new ideas because everybody is going to try to copy, which is what you want. You want people to start saying what you say.
I've learned that you can do something great, but you have to continue reinventing yourself as an artist. So by the time someone else is copying your style, you have something else to offer your audience.
So many people grew up with challenges, as I did. There weren't always happy things happening to me or around me. But when you look at the core of goodness within yourself - at the optimism and hope - you realize it comes from the environment you grew up in.
You should examine yourself daily. If you find faults, you should correct them. When you find none, you should try even harder.
Beauty is about perception, not about make-up. I think the beginning of all beauty is knowing and liking oneself. You can't put on make-up, or dress yourself, or do you hair with any sort of fun or joy if you're doing it from a position of correction.
The simple reality of life is that everyone is wrong on a regular basis. By confronting these inevitable errors, you allow yourself to make corrections before it is too late.
'Study' was the cry that reverberated in the corridors of my mind. Study to enable yourself to face the arguments advanced by opposition. Study to arm yourself with arguments in favor of your cult. I began to study.
I personally believe that the iPod is a frankly corrosive device because it encourages you to surround yourself with your favorites. The whole idea of a playlist is to surround yourself with your favorite things, and the interesting thing is that when you do that, they cease to be your favorites.
I think it is very important that you like yourself for who you are and not want to look like anyone else. You also have to understand, many people have had cosmetic surgeries in order to look the way they look. So why look like them when you can just look like you? And there is nothing wrong with looking like you.
How can you call yourself a cosmopolitan modern person if you don't know what hip-hop is?
If you make yourself indispensable to your employer, he is not going to part with you in a hurry no matter what it costs him.
I think it's counterproductive in many ways to pretend to know things you don't. You surround yourself with people who are the real experts.
