I like to do things that are publicly embarrassing, to feel the embarrassment touch me and sink into me and then be gone. I like getting on elevators and singing too loudly in that small space. The feeling you feel is almost like a vapor. The discomfort and the wishing that it would end that comes around you.

I think we always view people who make us feel uncomfortable and appear to intrude on our middle-class cozy space, we view them with, if not hostility, at least suspicion, discomfort, embarrassment.

Asteroids have us in our sight. The dinosaurs didn't have a space program, so they're not here to talk about this problem. We are, and we have the power to do something about it. I don't want to be the embarrassment of the galaxy, to have had the power to deflect an asteroid, and then not, and end up going extinct.

I'm romantic to the point of embarrassment.

When I think back to my childhood, it's with a mixture of amusement and embarrassment. I was always forgetting things. My mum called me scatty because I could never sit still. But there was no sense I was suffering from a medical condition as such.

I became obsessed with making more and more tiny things. I think I was trying to find a way of compensating for my embarrassment at having learning difficulties: people had made me feel small so I wanted to show them how significant 'small' could be.

Irregular contact with doctors means many men fail to receive any preventive care for potentially life-threatening conditions. In addition, when men do seek care, embarrassment can often prevent them from openly discussing health concerns with their physicians.

There isn't anybody out there who doesn't have a mental health issue, whether it's depression, anxiety, or how to cope with relationships. Having OCD is not an embarrassment anymore - for me. Just know that there is help and your life could be better if you go out and seek the help.

For my first show at 'SNL', I wrote a Bill Clinton sketch, and during our read-through, it wasn't getting any laughs. This weight of embarrassment came over me, and I felt like I was sweating from my spine out. But I realized, 'Okay, that happened, and I did not die.' You've got to experience failure to understand that you can survive it.

Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything - all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important.

A simple compliment goes a really long way - for a guy to just come over and say, 'You have great hair' or 'I really like your dress,' and then just smile and walk away. That's a great move, because he's sort of putting himself out there by doing that, but it won't lead to any embarrassment if the girl isn't interested.

The world is like a reverse casino. In a casino, if you gamble long enough, you're certainly going to lose. But in the real world, where the only thing you're gambling is, say, your time or your embarrassment, then the more stuff you do, the more you give luck a chance to find you.

I won't say there aren't any Harvard graduates who have never asserted a superior attitude. But they have done so to our great embarrassment and in no way represent the Harvard I know.

A writer - and, I believe, generally all persons - must think that whatever happens to him or her is a resource. All things have been given to us for a purpose, and an artist must feel this more intensely. All that happens to us, including our humiliations, our misfortunes, our embarrassments, all is given to us as raw material, as clay, so that we may shape our art.

"Pain, mistakes, failure, heart-stompingness, embarrassment, rejection, frustration, anger, loneliness, and occasionally feeling alienated are all part of the ride and are every bit as important as love, laughter, joy excitement, success, romance, hope, accomplishment, and trust.

So this is where all the vapid talk about the 'soul' of the universe is actually headed. Once the hard-won principles of reason and science have been discredited, the world will not pass into the hands of credulous herbivores who keep crystals by their sides and swoon over the poems of Khalil Gibran. The 'vacuum' will be invaded instead by determined fundamentalists of every stripe who already know the truth by means of revelation and who actually seek real and serious power in the here and now. One thinks of the painstaking, cloud-dispelling labor of British scientists from Isaac Newton to Joseph Priestley to Charles Darwin to Ernest Rutherford to Alan Turing and Francis Crick, much of it built upon the shoulders of Galileo and Copernicus, only to see it casually slandered by a moral and intellectual weakling from the usurping House of Hanover. An awful embarrassment awaits the British if they do not declare for a republic based on verifiable laws and principles, both political and scientific.

The Chicago historian Studs Terkel asked Bob Dylan in the sixties about how he went about writing a song and trying to outdo himself, or at least being as good as the last song he wrote, and his response was pretty damn perfect. "I'm content with the same old piece of wood," he said. "I just want to find another place to pound a nail?.?.?. Music, my writing, is something special, not sacred." If the songs Bob Dylan wrote aren't sacred, then nobody's songs are sacred. Nobody's. No one has ever laid on their deathbed thinking, "Thank God I didn't make that song. Thank God I didn't make that piece of art. Thank God I avoided the embarrassment of putting a bad poem into the world." Nobody reaches the end of their life and regrets even a single moment of creating something, no matter how shitty or unappreciated that something might have been. I'm writing this just weeks after returning from Belleville, where I sat next to my dad's bed in my childhood house and watched him die. I can guarantee you that in the final moments of his life, he wasn't kicking himself for all those times when he dared to make a fool of himself by singing too loud.

All beings so far have created something beyond themselves; and do you want to be the ebb of this great flood and even go back to the beasts rather than overcome man? What is the ape to man? A laughingstock or a painful embarrassment. And man shall be just that for the overman: a laughingstock or a painful embarrassment?

Of course, everyone's parents are embarrassing. It goes with the territory. The nature of parents is to embarrass merely by existing, just as it is the nature of children of a certain age to cringe with embarrassment, shame, and mortification should their parents so much as speak to them on the street.

Each of us has the right and the responsibility to assess the roads which lie ahead, and those over which we have traveled, and if the future road looms ominous or unpromising, and the roads back uninviting, then we need to gather our resolve and, carrying only the necessary baggage, step off that road into another direction. If the new choice is also unpalatable, without embarrassment, we must be ready to change that as well.

I used to be a discipline problem which caused me embarrassment until I realized that being a discipline problem in a racist society is sometimes an honor.

A simple compliment goes a really long way - for a guy to just come over and say 'You have great hair' or 'I really like your dress ' and then just smile and walk away. That's a great move because he's sort of putting himself out there by doing that but it won't lead to any embarrassment if the girl isn't interested.

I hope for the day when everyone can speak again of God without embarrassment.

Irregular contact with doctors means many men fail to receive any preventive care for potentially life-threatening conditions. In addition when men do seek care embarrassment can often prevent them from openly discussing health concerns with their physicians.