Once I started getting multiple days off in a row, it was a long year for me. That had never happened, and everybody knew I didn't like it.
I've been thinking a lot about folks denying what has happened in history, or just not acknowledging it.
Love is the most powerful thing of all and I remember thinking that - God, I'm about to make myself cry but, I remember thinking that when 9/11 happened because those last phone calls were about - the last thing knowingly, that I'm going to say on this earth is "I love you". What's more powerful than that? What's more proof than that? Beyond fear, beyond death.
When I was a child, for a public/civil servant to be caught in corrupt practices, that individual will be a pariah. He will be a complete reject of the society; he/she could not raise his or her voice to speak in the public. So what happened between that time and now? That time when a public officer, prison or customs officer caught in corruption hides his face in shame amongst his peers, he just couldn't come out publicly. Today, when they come back, they get chieftaincy titles, they are received in grand style, cows are killed, they ride on white horses.
All I cared about was the music, like hearing Townes [ Van Zandt] talking about "For the sake of the song"; it's all that mattered. In spite of me a couple of things happened, mainly the Eagles and Seven Bridges Road. That certainly helped me survive. Joan Baez, Rita Coolidge, and Ian Matthews did it.
My innovation message, specifically including energy, happened to be the same week that on Monday and Tuesday I announced the Breakthrough Energy Venture Group. Then on that Tuesday afternoon, in December, was when I sat down with him. I explained the US has great science here, this is where the market for these things is going to be. It connects to less pollution, it connects to U.S. jobs, it connects to security, not needing the energy coming from far away.
When it finally came my way and doors opened up for me to do it and to be on stage, it felt like a natural thing to try out. And it just so happened to speak to me. I really couldn't do what I needed to do in the most fulfilling way in Hayward, Calif., or in the Bay Area, that it required me to go off to NYU.
After eight years of [Barack Obama], look what happened in this election. Did the country flip again? No. I maintain it didn't flip in 2008-2009, and we were not a 60% radical leftist population like they tried to portray it as.
Where's the activism? Nobody knows. And anyone who thinks they know, like Todd Gitlin, has their head up their ass. Nobody knows. The day before every revolution that's ever happened, that revolution was impossible. The day before Rosa Parks, that was impossible. The day after, it was inevitable.
In Cairo, these young men hanging around in the street, we're told these guys are lazy, they're uneducated, they don't care, they don't have any political instincts - just like the working class in America, apparently - and then suddenly what the hell happened? What was that? They changed the world by changing themselves. Now is that over? No. Is the civil rights movement over? No. These movements have not accomplished what they set out to accomplish.
I've had that my whole career. People were always hedging around the question of: Why are you so dark? What happened to you?
A lot of [George Saunders] early stories now feel prophetic. Take the recent election [of Donald Trump]. Historians in 100 years might write about it as being the first internet election, in which what happened was actually an expression in the real world of a virtual reality. And you've been writing about that subject for a while.
Now have two generations whose minds have been totally perverted, polluted, and destroyed by the American public education system, and, in particular, the history curriculum. Breitbart has a story on how this has happened. As the left appeases Muslims, public schools are teaching students to hate America.
I don't know if it's ever happened to you, but it's one of my funniest and saddest experiences, when you go into a hotel, and they have an accessible walk-in shower. So you go in and open the curtain, and there is a bench off to the side of the shower. However, the shower is rectangular. On one side there's a bench, but the faucets are across from you. So if you sit on the bench, you cannot reach the faucets.
All I really know in nonfiction is that when I come home, I've got all these notes and I'm trying to figure out what actually happened to me. I usually kind of know what happened, but as you work through the notes, you find that certain scenes write well and some don't even though they should. Those make a constellation of meaning that weirdly ends up telling you what you just went through. It's a slightly different process, but still there's mystery because when you're bearing down on the scenes, sometimes you find out they mean something different than what you thought.
My family immigrated from Korea when I was four years old, and when I started school, I didn't speak English. I remember that other kids would blame everything bad that happened in kindergarten on me - I spent a lot of time "in the corner" because I literally didn't have the words to explain that it wasn't me!
I'm not what happened to me. I am what I choose to become.
As a Jewish man who has no interest in Judaism whatsoever, there's something in me that says when bad things have happened in the past, people were supposed to get more active and speak up and prevent them. That's what's important to me is that everybody - and I don't care what side you're on. You can disagree with me, but everyone better get active. Everybody better vote and be thoughtful.
That's what the news is: You turn on the news every night, whatever you watch, and you're expecting to see things that you didn't know happened. And that's not what it is.
You don't need 70 people in a White House press conference to tell people what happened there. You need a camera and maybe a couple reporters, and that's it.
One of the weirdest things that happened to artists and art criticism was this moment when everyone got cynical and stopped believing in the ability to engage the world in all of its myriad purposes, transformations, and incarnations.
I was bullied by my siblings and cousins, so make-believe was a way in which I could be in charge. When I was like 10 and my sister was about five, I convinced her that she was going to jail because she used a bad word. The doorbell happened to ring, and I told her it was the police. I made her pack her bags. She was crying, and then I said to her, "I forgive you, and I'm gonna tell the cop to go away." Then, of course, she loved me. It was terrible - she still remembers it. I had a sordid sense of humor.
If something happened, like engineers starting to quit, things would go downhill fast.
One of the things that happened is I did a lot of shitty gigs. When you do a bunch of shitty bar gigs you have to get used to people yelling at you, you're used to thinking on the fly, to dealing with weird situations.
The thing that's most uppermost in my mind and will continue to be until I hit a brick wall is that I am dead serious, dead serious about going after George Bush, trying to get him into an American courtroom and prosecute him for what happened in Iraq.
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