I started thinking about joy. Everything in our society is so purposeful. Let's bring joy back to the experience.

As an actress it's part of your job to be able to imagine just about anything - even if it's not within your personal experience.

I think being a parent is the most challenging thing you do. That's why we're here. It's at the heart of what it is to be a human being. It's the ultimate experience because it questions everything about who you are. But it's difficult.

Stories have always been the things that entertain me and make me feel happy and sad and move me and give me the experience of being able to live many lives in one lifetime. It's the best thing about being alive.

There are a lot of obstacles in the way of our understanding animal intelligence - not the least being that we can't even agree whether nonhuman species are conscious. We accept that chimps and dolphins experience awareness we like to think dogs and cats do. But what about mice and newts? What about a fly? Is anything going on there at all?

I'm not particularly precious about the theatrical experience any more.

I absolutely believe in the power of tithing and giving back. My own experience about all the blessings I've had in my life is that the more I give away the more that comes back. That is the way life works and that is the way energy works.

A great deal has been written in recent years about the purported lack of motivation in the children of the Negro ghettos. Little in my experience supports this yet the phrase has been repeated endlessly and the blame in almost all cases is placed somewhere outside the classroom.

Making an album should be an honest experience. It shouldn't be about trying to gauge where popular music is today it should be about artistic expression and putting down what you want to put down.

The bullied straight kid goes home to a shoulder to cry on and support and can talk freely about his experience at school and why he's being bullied. I couldn't go home and open up to my parents.

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.

Artists need some kind of stimulating experience a lot of times which crystallizes when you sing about it or paint it or sculpt it. You literally mold the experience the way you want. It's therapy.

Life it is not just a series of calculations and a sum total of statistics it's about experience it's about participation it is something more complex and more interesting than what is obvious.

I remember when I was 33 or 34 it was devastating because I realized I wasn't a kid anymore. The great thing about 40 was that I really felt like I had life experience and knew what I was doing now.

There are people hell-bent on the idea that we're a Christian band in disguise and that we have some secret message. We have no spiritual affiliation with this music. It's simply about life experience.

All observers not laboring under hallucinations of the senses are agreed or can be made to agree about facts of sensible experience through evidence toward which the intellect is merely passive and over which the individual will and character have no control.

When I was young I was just about hard work. But as I got older I did experience anxiety doubt judgment and it's so easy to lose yourself for a second.

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.

One nice thing about being a woman in Hollywood is that the women tend to be very close-knit. All of us writers and directors know each other and cling to each other for safety and support and it's really a completely different vibe than the men experience out here where they're all trying to murder each other.

You know it shouldn't just be about women as heroic figures overcoming things it just needs to be about women in general getting the opportunity to play a multitude of roles telling a multitude of stories - just to express human experience from a woman's perspective. I hope someday we can get to that point. I'm all about representation.

I hate it when people don't recognize the work of women as being universal or having any import to the world at large as opposed to men's work which is generally tends to be seen as more universal - men's writing about their own experience tends to be put in a broader context.

The first essential in writing about anything is that the writer should have no experience of the matter.

Many spiritual teachers - in Buddhism in Islam - have talked about first-hand experience of the world as an important part of the path to wisdom to enlightenment.

My image had always been very heterosexual very straight. So it was a nice experience for me a chance to clarify my own feelings about gay and lesbian civil rights.