Never Have Your Dog Stuffed: And Other Things I've Learned

The difference between listening and pretending to listen, I discovered, is enormous. One is fluid, the other is rigid. One is alive, the other is stuffed. Eventually, I found a radical way of thinking about listening. Real listening is a willingness to let the other person change you. When I’m willing to let them change me, something happens between us that’s more interesting than a pair of dueling monologues.

During the first day, curious at having outsiders among them, a long stream of inmates came over and talked with me. Remarkably, according to what they told me, nearly every inmate in the prison didn't do it. Several thousand people had been locked up unjustly and, by an incredible coincidence, all in the same prison. On the other hand, they knew an awful lot about how to knife somebody.

Real listening is a willingness to let the other person change you.

You can tell a lot about people by the way they treat the help.

My mother didn't try to stab my father until I was six.

Starting with a gray cloud of brain cells that was subject to storms and flash floods, I had to learn to make my own internal weather.

Maybe God is the ultimate bully who teases us with life, then pulls it out of reach. Maybe there's nothing I can do but let life curl up and disappear like an old photograph. Or maybe I can get it back. Maybe imagination gets it back. Perhaps play lets it breath again.

I had always wondered why people wanted to be rich and famous. If you could be rich and anonymous, that would be fun. To be famous and not rich, the way we were, was the least fun. It takes time and effort to be famous, and if they offer you fame without the money, don’t take it. It’s a scam.

Anesthetized by youth, I missed it.

You could measure how long I would remember that moment by the redness of my cheeks. My father saw that I liked projects and taught me how to make lamps out of Chianti bottles.

Paul Sills said "Reach into the dark and get the answer." That stuck with me. If you had the courage not to know the answer beforehand, it would come to you. If you could trust yourself *not knowing* was an exciting place to be.

life itself was an improvisation in which I was going to have to deal with what came to me and not think about what should have come.

Freud said that life is all about being able to love and to work. And I think it is about those things. But it's also about play. Play can bring back the past, but even if it doesn't, play is now; play is fun. More than ever, I have the feeling that all of what we do that counts is just love and work and play.

Raquel Welch, whom I’ve met but never kissed, once called the brain an erogenous zone.

I didn't know it, but what I was really looking for was compassion. Not consciously of course. I didn't consciously want to become compassionate. Who in his right mind would give up his place at the center of the universe? Compassion is scary. If you open up too much to people, they have power over you and make you i things for them. Better to keep them at a distance ...

Never Have Your Dog Stuffed' is really advice to myself, a reminder to myself not to avoid change or uncertainty, but to go with it, to surf into change.