We feel a lot of pressure about looking silly or appearing weak whatever that means or being a failure. You have to keep in your head: what's the worst that can happen?

Failure doesn't kill you... it increases your desire to make something happen.

The idea of capitalism is not just success but also the failure that allows success to happen.

Notice the difference between what happens when a man says to himself I have failed three times and what happens when he says I am a failure.

Failure happens all the time. It happens every day in practice. What makes you better is how you react to it.

Today the Iraqi citizen sees that America is coming and wants to occupy his country and kill him and he is willing to experience for himself what happened in Palestine.

I feel that the Christian experience and the Jewish one have much to give each other. If this open society continues and there is no return to political anti-Semitism then this encounter deeper than any theology may happen.

Whenever something happens that makes me laugh or if I remember something in the middle of the night that I want to share I jot the experience down.

Do I ever think Gossip will be really massive in America? No I don't think it'll happen - and that's fine. It's kind of nice because I get to experience everything at once. I get to come home and it not be weird like in Paris or something. It is nice to be completely anonymous.

Writing a story or a novel is one way of discovering sequence in experience of stumbling upon cause and effect in the happenings of a writer's own life.

Though 'Fire and Rain' is very personal for other people it resonates as a sort of commonly held experience... And that's what happens with me. I write things for personal reasons and then in some cases it... can be a shared experience.

No matter how close to personal experience a story might be inevitably you are going to get to a part that isn't yours and actually whether it happened or not becomes irrelevant. It is all about choosing the right words.

Something happens to us all when we experience something as a unit that doesn't occur when we're on our couches or holding our little portable DVD players.

I developed a mechanism so that whatever mistakes I made I would bounce straight back. Whatever was happening off the pitch I could put it to one side and maintain my form. Call it mental resilience or a strong mind but that is what we mean when we talk about experience in a football team.

Well I think the main message is there is more to your story. There is more than what happens between the crib and the grave and that is what I am really trying to speak to this idea that all of life is this life and that there is nothing more than what we see and experience right here on this earth.

It's more fun to experience things when you don't know what's going to happen.

You may never learn the names of any of the people you talk to in a dog park even after many many hours spent there with them and many hours of conversation. But if - knock on wood - anything should ever happen to your dog these nameless non-strangers will rally sympathize offer to help and hold your hand. I know this from experience.