Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
At the time I was writing 'Weedflower,' my friend Naomi Hirahara was writing a book about Japanese-American flower farmers. She knew quite a few elderly farmers and put me in touch with four or five of them who had been in camps during WWII. Some, like my father, were reluctant to talk about their experiences.
My go-to gifts are scarves from my friend Matin Maulawizada's nonprofit organization, Afghan Hands, which supports disenfranchised women in Afghanistan. In exchange for their beautiful embroidery, the women are given financial aid and classes in math and literacy. The scarves are all stunning and one of a kind.
I had talked for years about doing a restaurant with Rocky Dudum, who's been my friend since I first came to San Francisco. Then Rocky's son, Jeff, said he wanted to design it, so he traveled around the country to sports restaurants like Mickey Mantle's and Michael Jordan's, and he came up with a great concept.
I really loved animals when I was little - my friend and I had an imaginary vet's office; we would mime doing surgery on animals. We treated more injuries than illnesses - fixing with a baby bear with a broken leg, removing a tumor. Of course, our surgeries would take about five seconds; that's how good we were.
I didn't date my wife in high school, but she was definitely by far the coolest woman there. She was definitely the most beautiful, but she also marched to the beat of her own drummer. I was in New Orleans 10 years after high school and my friend played matchmaker with us, and that's kind of how we got together.
Some people are really proud of me, and some don't like it. I don't really know what to tell those people. It's like people that don't know me or people that aren't even my friends saying I've changed. I have two friends - exactly two friends. It's like, how can someone that's not even my friend say I've changed?
I did tons of theater in school, and then when I was 16 and got my driver's license, I started driving to Los Angeles, along with my friend Eric Stoltz, who was a year ahead of me and was doing the same thing. So we had the same manager, and we started auditioning for things and doing commercials when we were 16.
I don't go out with the plan, 'Let me find a celebrity to go date.' That's just not something you do. I'm just looking for a good person, someone who can be my friend, and someone I can have fun with. She doesn't have to be a celebrity; she can be a regular chick. She's got to be smart, though. I like smart women.
My guiltiest pleasure? 'Untamed & Uncut'. Videos of people being attacked by animals. Yeah. I don't know why. I just love seeing guys who say, 'I'm gonna stick my hand in that crocodile's mouth and see what happens.' And then it snaps down on them. There you go - that's what you get! It's a wild animal, my friend.
My friend Josh Glenn compiles terrific lists of genre novels from the mid-20th century. His latest is a list of the ten best adventure novels of 1966. Josh also includes the cover art of early editions of the books, which are always much better than the art on newer editions. I want to read every book in this list!
I really love 'Real Housewives.' It's like the, you know, comedy stuff that's, like, intentionally funny. Like, I love 'Nathan for You,' that Comedy Central show. It's just brilliant. My friend Bill Eichner has a show called 'Billy on the Street' that I write for, and even if I didn't write for it, I'd still love it.
I was raised in a little church, the Grundy Methodist Church, that was very straight-laced, but I had a friend whose mother spoke in tongues. I was just wild for this family. My own parents were older, and they were so over-protective. I just loved the 'letting go' that would happen when I went to church with my friend.
You know, 'Top Gun' was the movie I saw in high school that made me want to be a filmmaker. I remember very specifically coming out of the Century 21 Theater in Colorado from seeing it, and my friend saying, 'What did you think of the movie?' And I said, 'I think I know what I want to do for a living.' That's a true story.
Everybody wants to see this fight. Everybody wants to see these fireworks. They want to see that explosiveness. They want to see me throw Khabib on his back and get that five-point motion with this U.S.A. wrestling. Because if wrestling was easy, it would be called Sambo, my friend. Straight up, I'm going mop that dude up.
I woke up one morning to an email from my friend Alex that said she'd had her bag stolen. Ordinarily, I'm quite quick on the uptake, but - maybe because of the way it was worded - I immediately replied, 'What??????' As soon as I hit send, I realised I was being scammed. But then they replied, and I thought, 'Well, why not?'
On our swim team, they had something called the 'developmental meet.' I didn't know it was a meet only for the worst kids so that they could get a ribbon, and I'd show up with my friend who was also a terrible swimmer, and we would be amazed that the best kids hadn't bothered to show up. I didn't get it until after college.
As my friend said to me, when you have children, typically in a second marriage, when you're older and you get married again to a woman who would have children, you must always remember that you make sure the children attend a college where the commencement ceremonies are held in a facility with a wheelchair accessible ramp.
Curiously, many Democrats have acceded to Clintonism not because of their cold practicality and political professionalism, but because the Clintons are the sworn enemy of the right. The Clintons, in other words, while hardly being left, have been defined as the opposite of being right - the enemy of my enemy being my friend.
My friend Jonathan had a great tree house. It was awesome. It was like a big fort up in this tall magnolia tree... That's where we would conduct our very important business, I'm sure, with all our bikes leaning up against a tree and no girls allowed, handling all sorts of important things you handle when you're seven or eight.
I was very proud to hear that my friend Andre Johnson was like, 'Man, I'm going back to school.' I was so excited because, yeah you have great talent. You do everything on Sundays, you do everything on the field, but you went to college, and I'm not saying that you forgot about it, but that was on your mind when you first went.
I had a couple of really cool friends when I was a kid, and we'd find cool music and movies and show them to each other. My friend Dennis had a copy of 'A Clockwork Orange' and he'd already seen it once, and he was like, 'We need to watch this.' I was sleeping over his house - and I think we were literally 15 - and we watched it.
I became quite a diva, and intolerant, and people knew when I was not pleased. Some people were afraid of me, and other people just kind of blew me off. But I wasn't making any friends. I only had one person who remained my friend, and he was my boyfriend for a while. Even though I told him I was gay, he was like, 'That's alright.'
It's either, like, 'Your album was the first jazz album I listened to,' or, like, 'My friend took me to this show, and I've never been to a jazz show before, but, man, I'm so happy I came. I can't wait to go home and see more.' And you can feel it in the crowd, too. You can see the groups of people that don't really know what to expect.
My friend Patsy Mink was a champion for social and economic justice, equality and civil rights for women and marginalized communities. She was a trailblazer who never backed down from a challenge and whose work in Hawaii and Congress brought positive change to the lives of women, children, and minorities in Hawaii and across the country.
When Neal Schon discovered the videos on YouTube, he tried to find my friend's e-mail address, so he found it, and he sent him an e-mail claiming that he's Mr. Neal Schon, and he's from Journey, and he's serious about getting me to San Francisco to try out as their frontman. When my friend forwarded the e-mail to me, I was just laughing.
I was never one to go up to someone as a five- or six-year-old and say, 'Hello, my name's Paul, will you be my friend?' But I found if I did an impression of the PE teacher or whatever and people laughed, then they did like me, and so then they started talking to me, rather than me making the initial overture and then maybe being rebuffed.
I'm essentially a humorist and, I think, a pretty good one. I've known all along that 'My Friend Dahmer' is the one book I'll be most known for, and in a way, that's a drag, as it's nothing like the rest of the work I've done or will do moving forward. But the way I figure, it's better to have a best-known work than not to have one at all.
In San Paulo I went to the movies and by the time I left the theater there was a mob at the exit. I had never been in that kind of situation when we weren't on tour and there was a whole bunch of security. I'm a little dude, and out of nowhere to have 50 or 60 people come running towards me when I'm jut with my friend, it was kind of scary.
2009 was one of the busiest, most insane, stressful periods in my entire career. I was raising a bunch of money, buying a bunch of Twitter. I saw my friend fired as CEO of Twitter. Uber was growing like a weed. As these companies get bigger and bigger, there's more and more friction. Being public was the last thing I wanted to do at the time.
I was watching a movie called 'Perfume.' The book is really good, but the movie is really bad. My friend was making fun of it. He kept calling this obese guy a perfume genius. When I started putting my songs up on MySpace, I didn't know what was going to happen. I actually didn't put much thought into a name and just quickly used Perfume Genius.