Silly, I know, but I 100% appreciate the effort. Instead of walking into my office, browsing my shelves, and possibly saving herself a trip to return the item, she crosses her fingers and hopes I don’t already have said item. The problem is, she never knows what I have. She has narrowed it down to media books, a Blu-ray movie, or a record. It’s also a guide to catching more greenlights - and to realizing that the yellows and reds eventually turn green too.įor any gift-giving opportunity I have, my wife is usually great at pinpointing what she surmises I would like. Hopefully, it’s medicine that tastes good, a couple of aspirin instead of the infirmary, a spaceship to Mars without needing your pilot’s license, going to church without having to be born again, and laughing through the tears. Getting away withs, getting caughts, and getting wets while trying to dance between the raindrops. Graces, truths, and beauties of brutality. This is fifty years of my sights and seens, felts and figured-outs, cools and shamefuls. So I took a one-way ticket to the desert and wrote this book: an album, a record, a story of my life so far. I found a reliable theme, an approach to living that gave me more satisfaction, at the time, and still: If you know how, and when, to deal with life’s challenges - how to get relative with the inevitable - you can enjoy a state of success I call “catching greenlights.” I found stories I experienced, lessons I learned and forgot, poems, prayers, prescriptions, beliefs about what matters, some great photographs, and a whole bunch of bumper stickers. Recently, I worked up the courage to sit down with those diaries.

Notes about successes and failures, joys and sorrows, things that made me marvel, and things that made me laugh out loud. I’ve been in this life for fifty years, been trying to work out its riddle for forty-two, and been keeping diaries of clues to that riddle for the last thirty-five.

From the Academy Award®–winning actor, an unconventional memoir filled with raucous stories, outlaw wisdom, and lessons learned the hard way about living with greater satisfaction

Green lights book review