It's kind of astonishing that people trust strangers because of words they write on computer screens.
I want the reader to feel something is astonishing. Not the 'what happens,' but the way everything happens. These long short story fictions do that best, for me.
Nobody knows anything. I deal with people in all walks of life, some of whom should have some idea of what they're doing. And they're all clueless. It's astonishing that any bridges stay up, or that planes don't constantly plummet from the sky. It's heartening, in a strange way.
Nothing in education is so astonishing as the amount of ignorance it accumulates in the form of inert facts.
In the last ten years of watching films I have found that some of the foreign films I saw affected me most. One American film that stands out for me for its workmanship and artistry is 'Ratatouille.' It was an astonishing effort in filmmaking.
First of all, there was a volcano of words, an eruption of words that Shakespeare had never used before that had never been used in the English language before. It's astonishing. It pours out of him.
I get to go to work and come home with something interesting or enriching or astonishing.
The real story of the Ground Zero mosque is that the project only became feasible because of the appalling and astonishing fecklessness of the officials who were charged with the reconstruction of the site and the neighborhood all the way back in 2001.
It is astonishing that human brains, which evolved to cope with the everyday world, have been able to grasp the counterintuitive mysteries of the cosmos and the quantum.
For me, returning to Los Angeles annihilates the memories of where I have just been with an astonishing speed.