Everything we have on this: living voices from interviews, books and films — side by side.
I never tried to fit in. I prefer to be myself, even if it's alien.
The memoir of a woman raised on an isolated survivalist Mormon family farm without school, official documents, or doctors — an account of how education becomes not just knowledge but a way of separating from one's own…
A film about how freedom won through the loss of everything that held you turns out to be its own kind of pain, not relief.
I'll never sell my soul for money or fame. It's my only true asset.
A history of humankind read as a history of shared fictions that got millions of strangers to cooperate as one.
A wrongly convicted banker spends two decades inside a brutal prison keeping an inner freedom intact and quietly preparing his own way out — less a jailbreak than an act of sustained dignity.
Jimi Hendrix showed me that there are no boundaries in music. You can do anything
A French nobleman invented the essay as a form because he wanted to watch his own mind honestly at work — and discovered that a person is so shifting and self-contradictory that the only reliable ground is the act of…
A film about a French wire-walker who spent years plotting an illegal crossing between the Twin Towers for a few minutes aloft — shot like a heist thriller in which the prize was not money but beauty.
Remember, we came into the world with nothing. We don't need money or fame.
The autobiography of a man who spent 27 years in prison for fighting apartheid and emerged not as an avenger but as a president prepared to build reconciliation with his former enemies.
A quiet road movie about a woman who, after losing her home and her husband, chooses life on the road in a van — not as an escape but as a way to grieve and live at once.
People should only give their opinion if you ask them
the opening volume of the Neapolitan novels, about the friendship of two girls from a poor district — a rivalry, envy, and mutual pull that turns out to outlast every man and circumstance in their lives.
A film about how a single evening of talk with a stranger can carry as much weight as years of shared life — it just measures time differently.
You need to stand in your truth, move through the world with intention
A psychiatrist who survived several concentration camps distills his ordeal into a method of therapy: a person can endure almost any suffering if they can locate even a trace of personal meaning within it.
A family drama that, through one domestic conflict, unfolds into a precise study of how truth, protective lies, and competing notions of duty coexist inside ordinary people.
Being yourself is the greatest gift you can give the world
An attempt to explain why some peoples conquered others rather than the reverse — not through racial superiority but through accidents of geography: which plants, animals and diseases a continent happened to have.
Genre doesn't exist to me. I just make music that feels right
a novel about how an idea built to justify murder collapses not under evidence but under the murderer's own conscience.
When I was young, I didn't think about consequences. I just wrote songs and sang.
a novel about a disgraced professor who ends up on his daughter's farm in the new South Africa and has to relearn how to live without the privileges he once took for granted.
Music is the universal language. It unites people regardless of origin.
A philosophical essay arguing that the universe never answers the human hunger for meaning, and asking whether, once that mismatch is named absurd, a person can go on living without either self-deception or suicide …
Music transcends all boundaries—racial, national, any boundary you can name.
a novel about what happens when a hunger for real feeling collides with a society that punishes honesty.
When you stop controlling, you find freedom. Surrender is not defeat, it's liberation.
About systems and people that don't merely withstand the blows of chance but grow stronger from them, and about why robustness and antifragility are fundamentally different qualities that get confused all the time.
Every woman needs to know how to fall in love with herself.
A philosophical inquiry into the different kinds of activity that make up a human life — laboring, making things, and acting together with others — and why the modern age has come to dangerously undervalue the last and…
Jazz is an art form born of freedom and self-expression.
Politics is personal. If you believe in justice, you're obliged to speak about it.
The only boundaries are the ones we put on ourselves.
For me, life is the road. Each journey teaches me something new about myself and the world.
R-E-S-P-E-C-T. That's what I want from you. That's what matters in life.
A musician cannot stand apart. We must use our voice for justice.
At Woodstock I just wanted to express what I felt in that moment.
I'm the one that has to die when it's time for me to die, so let me live my life the way I want to.
Music is a universal language that brings us all together across all boundaries.
Cinema begins where ordinary life ends, at the edge of ecstasy
I'm not afraid to contradict myself if the story demands it
Jazz is like democracy. Every voice matters, every musician can express themselves, yet they listen to each other. It is music of freedom and mutual respect.
Luxury means freedom. When I create shiny, gilded, expensive, I'm saying something about the desire to be free.
I approach every film as if it's going to be my last one. That gives me the freedom to do what I truly want to say.
In jazz, everything happens in real time. You have a fraction of a second to feel, hear, understand, and respond. This is intuition at its highest level.
I quit drinking because I realized I was wasting my time. I needed to be clear to do good work.
Autocracy makes us blind. We stop seeing each other as human beings.
Silence is complicity. If you see injustice, you must speak up.