There's something undeniably oxymoronic about a 'successful' rock n' roll band. Who wants to hear a bunch of success stories whining about their success? More importantly, what can be the drive behind a band, what can they have to rage against when they are successes? That's a dichotomy every successful band wrestles with.
I love having a man in my life, and being his woman at the end of the day. I know it's a dichotomy.
Watching President Obama, for the first time in my life, one of us was running for president. He seemed like one of us - and I got behind him, and I got excited about his message and what he continues to say he's going to do. The day he was elected president, Prop 8 happened. It was this bizarre dichotomy - world history - good and bad.
The distinction between literary and genre fiction is stupid and pernicious. It dates back to a feud between Robert Louis Stevenson and Henry James. James won, and it split literature into two streams. But it's a totally false dichotomy.
There's a huge dichotomy between people who grow up with alienation, which, for me, was invaluable, and people who grow up so completely privileged that it breeds this complacency and lack of desire to question or challenge or do anything significant. Those are the types of people who become partners at the corporate law firms.
When we were shooting 'Oz,' my wife was doing 'Beauty and the Beast' on Broadway, singing and dancing. It was an interesting dichotomy in our house.
My own career reflects a strange dichotomy between the world we've long known and the world that will become.
Back in 2008, after we'd won the election, no one really expected me to keep teaching. But I couldn't just walk away... So I did both. For eight years, that was my life's dichotomy. State receptions - and midterms. Dinner with the most powerful man on earth - and study sessions with single moms.
That dichotomy between the public consumption of the work and my intent and practice in making it is an uneasy one for me, on occasion.
Just as discipline and freedom are opposing forces that must be balanced, leadership requires finding the equilibrium in the dichotomy of many seemingly contradictory qualities between one extreme and another.
