For-profit higher education is today a booming industry, feeding on the student loans handed out to the desperate.

Dreams have always expanded our understanding of reality by challenging our boundaries of the real, of the possible.

Meyer and I have a bit in common because we're both left-handed. I think it's great that he seeks out that advice because he's not too cool or too uncomfortable to ask for it.

I started on the clarinet. I was going to a music school - my mother took me - and the guy said, 'What do you want to play?' I said the drums, and my mother said, 'No, you don't. You don't want to play the drums.' So I said, 'Maybe the trumpet would be cool.' And my mother said, 'I don't think so.' And then the clarinet was handed to me.

How I found out is, I landed in Des Moines from a plane ride back from the Rob Zombie tour. I was, like, 'Okay, cool, I'm home. I can finally get some rest.' Once I landed, I turned my phone on, and my manager rang, and I'm, like, 'Oh, what?' He said, 'Paul Gray just died.'

Because I believe that humans are computers, I conjectured that computers, like people, can have left- and right-handed versions.

One Christmas I had no money, and so I went home and just, like, wrote a poem; I mean, I didn't write them, but I just handed out poems as Christmas presents. Like, 'Here's a Pablo Neruda poem that really made me think of you.'

But I think talent as a writer is hard-wired in, it's all there, at least the basic elements of it. You can't change it any more than you can choose whether to be right handed or left handed.

If the girl is good looking and talented, and for some reason the film doesn't work, she gets a second chance. But if subsequent films don't work, she gets branded as an 'iron leg.' The whole thing gets negative.

Every possession and every happiness is but lent by chance for an uncertain time, and may therefore be demanded back the next hour.

I actually met The Game in my hood on Crenshaw and Slauson. I was outside on the block with 20 of my homies. I see the Range Rover, and we all walked up to his car. I handed him my CD.

I have been a frequent air traveler since I was a few months shy of my sixth birthday, when my parents packed me off to boarding school two plane rides away from home. Those days of being willingly handed from air hostess to air hostess as an 'unaccompanied minor' made me blase about the rigors of air travel.

I actually had the pleasure of meeting David Bowie at his 50th birthday party in New York City. I handed him the cassette of 'Eight Arms to Hold You,' which I had just got an advance of that day. He very graciously thanked me and tucked it into his jacket pocket.

Happiness does not come from doing easy work but from the afterglow of satisfaction that comes after the achievement of a difficult task that demanded our best.

I think that generally music should be a positive thing, I like Bob Marley's attitude: he said that his goal in life was to single handedly fight all the evil in the world with nothing but music, and when he went to a place he didn't go to play, he went to conquer.

I think the fact that all women get branded as the same, desperate for love, desperate for children, is just a really unmodern attitude.

My mom was funny and nutty. I suppose she had to be to survive raising 10 kids. To cope and keep a cap on things, she kept us buoyant and harmonious. She wouldn't let us express anger, which later on landed me in therapy but also made it easier for me to play laid-back, measured roles.

Hoping they'd been inspired by the examples of Anne Frank and other teens who had turned negative experiences into something positive by writing about them, I handed out notebooks for my students to journal about their lives. There was some initial resistance. But then the stories poured out of them, full of anger and sadness.

When you go back to the days when I was studying how to paint, some of the things that excited me most was to go into the Huntington Library and Gardens and to see the amazing pictures of the landed gentry.

First draft: let it run. Turn all the knobs up to 11. Second draft: hell. Cut it down and cut it into shape. Third draft: comb its nose and blow its hair. I usually find that most of the book will have handed itself to me on that first draft.

Isn't that what every girl dreamed? That she'd wake and find herself a princess? or blessed with magical powers and a grand destiny. Maybe there were people who lived those lives, maybe this girl was one of them but what about the rest of us? What about the nobodies and the nothings, the invisible girls? We learn to hold our heads as if we wear crowns, we learn to ring magic from the ordinary, that's how you survived when you weren't chosen, when there was no royal bloods in your veins, when the world owed you nothing, you demanded something of it anyway!

Introspective souls are often tormented by their passionate visions. This is because visionaries see what shall be and wake up to what is. However, if you couldn't see a glimpse of the city lights while stranded in the forest, how would you ever know to walk in that direction? Sometimes, your vision can't be put into action, until you gather the learning experiences, along your journey first.

"That is life, isn't it? Fate. Luck. Chance. A long series of what-if's that lead from one moment to the next, time never pausing for you to catch your breath, to make sense of the cards that have been handed to you. And all you can do is play your cards and hope for the best, because in the end, it all comes back to those three basics.

To fall in love for any reason does cause fires of emotion. When we are in love, we ride on a positive energy as compared to not being in love. When we are love, we transcend conditional love to that of unconditional and we are now flowering in consciousness. Love is a very important element of consciousness as it becomes purer with Source union even as our consciousness is expanded further. Consciousness is love that is light.