As an actor, you have to give up all control to the director. He's the boss and has all the power. I'm a control freak, so that's really hard for me. Then when you see a film later, it can be infuriating, really disappointing. I've been very lucky, though, and so many of my early experiences were great.

My father always taught by telling stories about his experiences. His lessons were about morality and art and what insects and birds and human beings had in common. He told me what it meant to be a man and to be a Black man. He taught me about love and responsibility, about beauty, and how to make gumbo.

To all the people that he hurt, I'm not - I can't be an apologist for David Koresh, but I feel for people that have had negative experiences at the hands of David. Let me put it that way. I think about those people, whether I agree with them on every point or not. Everyone has a right to their experience.

I'm a creature of adaptation. I take advantage of the second and the moment. My comedy breathes; it's not really that predictable. I do have a linear style, but other than that, there's a lot of abstract. I just go off on what I'm thinking. I'm not that topical. I like to talk about me and my experiences.

I have a lot of influences. I like to sit down with the cinematographer a month before, and we'll watch pieces of 20 or 30 movies. You're basically the sum of all the experiences you've ever had, and they're sort of shaken up in you and reproduced in the things you create, and that includes seeing movies.

It was through my hashtag #girlslikeus where I connected with other trans women on Twitter and Tumblr. We had challenging conversations, courageous personal revelations, and shared insights and experiences, and just had fun. The hashtag tethered me to many women in my community in impactful, lasting ways.

My first experiences of Colorado travel have been rather severe. At Greeley, I got a small upstairs room at first, but gave it up to a married couple with a child, and then had one downstairs no bigger than a cabin, with only a canvas partition. It was very hot, and every place was thick with black flies.

People want leaders. Not ideologues. Not people whose life experiences have been so narrow that they've been able to maintain the purity of their youthful ideals. Not people whose principal contact with political life comes in the form of speeches and sound bites rather than decisions and responsibilities.

And then 'Wanderlust,' Ken Marino and David Wain wrote the funniest - they're amazing. That was one of my most favorite creative experiences; we're all up at that commune, a small group of people. Everyone was funnier than the next. It was an amazing ensemble feeling. Everyone gave and took in the best way.

Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn't really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That's because they were able to connect experiences they've had and synthesize new things.

I think there's a disconnect between political leaders and young voters around a lot of things related to the private sector. For example, a lot of politicians continue to attack big banks. While I'm not a defender of big banks, my sense is younger voters have had generally pretty good experiences with banks.

The same stimuli in the world can be inducing very different experiences internally and it's probably based on a single change in a gene. What I am doing is pulling the gene forward and imaging and doing behavioural tests to understand what that difference is and how reality can be constructed so differently.

I like the idea that people who see 'Gone Girl' are possibly going to come out with incredibly different reactions to it - not just between men and women, but if you are in a good relationship or a bad relationship. Everyone is going to bring their own bundle of prejudices and viewpoints and experiences to it.

Everything you do on Facebook will affect what comes in your view in the future. If you like crappy things that you don't care about, you'll see more crappy brands that you don't care about in the future, and it might even affect your experiences when you walk into bars, churches, schools, shopping malls, etc.

Adventure has to do with private, personal experiences. But, the possibilities, there are millions of unclimbed mountains - I have seen in the Eastern part of Tibet, mountains 6,000-6,500 meters high, vertical walls twice as tall as the Eiger... but nobody is going there, because they aren't 8,000-meter peaks.

In order for us to have changes in society, we have to do a better job with listening to each other, listening to stories, listening to experiences and sharing things. That's the way you're able to come to a better understanding of people in general. We have to do a better job in society. It starts at the top.

In our early experiences with bitcoin, we found how few people were building bitcoin exchanges the right way. They really weren't taking the regulation seriously; they were taking it too much like how you would approach something when you're 18, full of the excitement of youth and throwing caution to the wind.

Do not flinch from experiences that might destroy your beliefs. The thought you cannot think controls you more than thoughts you speak aloud. Submit yourself to ordeals and test yourself in fire. Relinquish the emotion which rests upon a mistaken belief, and seek to feel fully that emotion which fits the facts.

I've always thrown myself into different kinds of experiences, sometimes into really bad things. But, you grow up. You become more of a woman and you know yourself. I think knowing yourself is a wonderful thing especially when you're in your 40s and you're kind of in your skin. Life is not so confusing anymore.

I'm really happy that more and more people are making their own comics. I remember how daunting it was for me to just put pen to paper, page by page, until you had a finished comic, but the way new creators are doing that and bravely bringing their unique voices and experiences to their work is really inspiring.

The stuff I did in 'Rescue Me' was great. It gave me the opportunity to play comedy, and Denis Leary was the first one to take a chance with me. And from that experience, we had a comedy pilot that we did that I was going to play the lead in. And then 'Person of Interest' came along. They're all new experiences.

My first mentor and inspiration was my Irish Dancing teacher Patricia Mulholland. She created her own form of dance known as Irish ballet and created stage productions of old Irish myths and legends. They were my first experiences on stage. She told my mum I was destined for the stage, and I took that as my cue.

Like our physical bodies, our memory becomes out of shape. As children, we are constantly learning new experiences, but by the time we reach our 20s, we start to lead a more sedentary life both mentally and physically. Our lives become routine, and we stop challenging our brains, and our memory starts to suffer.

Although my father's mother, Nancy, has dementia, and her experiences gave me ideas for some of the scenes in the book, it was my mother's mother, Vera, who most influenced the character of Maud. Vera died in 2008, before I'd gotten very far into writing 'Elizabeth Is Missing,' but her voice is very like Maud's.

'The Haters' has some of the generalities of band experiences that I've had - the camaraderie, the grubbiness, the outsized collective ambitions and frequent painful collisions with reality - but very few of the specifics. I guess it was a way for me to take some of my experiences to their logical crazy extremes.

What I strive to do is to make the theater experience something that people remember and recall rather than dismiss because it was less like their everyday experiences. So, I'm less interested in internal emotionalism and much more in making the audience laugh and cry by the devices that we use as theater actors.

If you read a book about school - someone else's book - you always translate it into your own school experiences. It's describing the student: he's bewildered and lost in a large crowd in a university classroom. You'll visualize that from your own experiences. So, everything you know is what you're really writing.

Sadly, whites are rarely open to what black and brown folks have to say regarding their ongoing experiences with racist mistreatment. And we are especially reluctant to discuss what that mistreatment means for us as whites: namely that we end up with more and better opportunities as the flipside of discrimination.

Self-pity, a dominant characteristic of sociopaths, is also the characteristic that differentiates heroic storytelling from psychological rumination. When you talk about your experiences to shed light, you may feel wrenching pain, grief, anger, or shame. Your audience may pity you, but not because you want them to.

Many of my fellow atheists consider all talk of 'spirituality' or 'mysticism' to be synonymous with mental illness, conscious fraud, or self-deception. I have argued elsewhere that this is a problem - because millions of people have had experiences for which 'spiritual' and 'mystical' seem the only terms available.

I think the only reason I wanted to do modeling, really, was because I knew I wasn't ready to act; I knew I didn't have enough life experience, and I knew that doing photo shoots was a way of acting. Playing a character each shoot and being able to just emerge yourself in these awkward experiences - it was amazing.

I really just try to enjoy the game and hope that I can inspire young kids. I started playing tennis because of Monica Seles, and I try to promote the sport in the best possible way. Sometimes it's hard because you get upset on court, but I think in life one learns through experiences in order to evolve as a person.

You know, all these sentiments about beauty coming from within, they've always resonated when I've read them, but it takes a bit of living to truly appreciate them. To realise we are so much more than our experiences, that we are who we are because of the lessons we've learnt, now that's what true 'beauty' is for me.

If the cosmos isn't finite, then far, far away, floating duplicates of your brain - with all its experiences, thoughts, and emotions - are occasionally (and temporarily) thrown together by the random combining of atoms. Such 'Boltzmann brains,' as they're called, are a disturbing consequence of an unlimited universe.

The good part about getting older is you stop trying to prove anything to anyone, including yourself. All you are in the pursuit of is collecting experiences - beautiful, fragile little soap bubbles that you store in your heart, and every once in a while you pull one out and gaze at the delicate pictures it shows you.

Back in the old days, when I was a child, we sat around the family table at dinner time and exchanged our daily experiences. It wasn't very organized, but everyone was recognized and all the news that had to be told was told by each family member. We listened to each other and the interest was not put on; it was real.

I go on a good many adventure-type trips. Whenever I go on one, it's always potentially going to be the setting for one of my books. I pay more attention to certain aspects than some other people might. Sometimes I use them, sometimes I don't. Most of the books I write are based on experiences I've had to some extent.

You know, I've got experiences going back to the wage price controls in the Nixon administration where, in effect, we had what I think was a terrible mistake, in that case a Republican administration, where moved in and tried to control the wages, prices and profits of every enterprise in America. It was a huge mistake.

I learned so much in Zimbabwe, in particular about the need for humility in our ambition to extend mental health care in countries where there were very few psychiatrists and where the local culture harboured very different views about mental illness and healing. These experiences have profoundly influenced my thinking.

I found this website, The Experience Project, which has people write first-hand experiences of their life and what they went through. There would be a 75-year-old man who talked about his childhood or a 15-year-old girl who talked about what she is going through right now. It was amazing to read their personal thoughts.

In a strange way, Louise Erdrich is perhaps our least famous great American writer; she is not reclusive, but she is reticent, and her public appearances give the impression of a carefully controlled performance. But Erdrich has also shared many of her most intimate emotions and experiences, in some form, in her novels.

I always felt that with an Antoine Doinel film, Truffaut was taking a vacation, that Francois could relax when making a Doinel film. All of the language came to him very easily. 'The 400 Blows,' I felt, was a collage of all his childhood experiences. Every time he felt an Antoine Doinel film was necessary, he'd make one.

Every time I would give a talk, someone would say, 'You ought to go into politics.' I prefer to call it government leadership. My life has taken me to places where I have experiences that I think I can share. A lot of times, we see people who are career politicians. I'm not the conventional candidate, nor do I want to be.

My first series, the 'Inheritance' trilogy, in the first book, you were dealing with a woman of color from an impoverished culture, being brought up among wealthy, privileged white people and having to cope and perform in ways that she has not been raised to do, and that was obviously drawn from some personal experiences.

I'm committed to increasing long-term value for shareholders and am confident we will continue to do so through the successful execution of our core strategic priorities: the creation of high quality, branded content and experiences, the use of technology, and creating growth in numerous and exciting international markets.

We all have to strive to learn what motivates us, learn from our experiences, and what feels right and what feels wrong. There's a strong component over the years to having formal processes that help to identify lessons that need to be learned, and actions that need to be taken. In other words, how do you find the big idea?

Both for my wife and myself, the personal friendships that have grown out of scientific contacts with colleagues from many different countries have been an important part of our lives, and the travels we have made together in connection with the world-wide scientific co-operation have given us rich treasures of experiences.

When you're going through something, whether it's a wonderful thing like having a child or a sad thing like losing somebody, you often feel like 'Oh my God, I'm so overwhelmed; I'm dealing with this huge thing on my own.' In fact, poetry's a nice reminder that, no, everybody goes through it. These are universal experiences.

I think I'm drawn to more villain-type characters, because it's so cool to get to say all the things you want to say. In Hollywood, you get to this position where you have to bite your tongue so much. You take all your experiences of not being able to say what you really want to say, and channel that through your character.

A city like London is sociable in a sense that there are people gathering in bars and restaurants, concerts and lectures. Yet you can partake of all these experiences and never say hello to anyone new. And one of the things that all religions do is take groups of strangers into a space and say it is OK to talk to each other.

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