Greenlights

From the Academy Award-winning actor comes an unconventional memoir filled with raucous stories, outlaw wisdom, and lessons learned the hard way about living with greater satisfaction. 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. These notes include successes and failures, joys and sorrows, things that made me marvel, and things that made me laugh out loud.

I explore how to be fair, how to have less stress, how to have fun, how to hurt people less, how to get hurt less, how to be a good man, how to find meaning in life, and how to be more myself. Recently, I gathered the courage to sit down with those diaries. I discovered stories I experienced, lessons I learned and forgot, poems, prayers, beliefs about what matters, some great photographs, and a collection of bumper stickers.

I found a reliable theme, an approach to living that provided me with more satisfaction: 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." 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. This is fifty years of my sights and experiences, feelings and realizations, triumphs and embarrassments.

It encompasses graces, truths, and the beauties of brutality. It reflects getting away with things, getting caught, and getting wet while trying to dance between the raindrops. Hopefully, it's medicine that tastes good, a couple of aspirin instead of the infirmary, a spaceship to Mars without needing a pilot's license, going to church without having to be born again, and laughing through the tears.

It's a love letter to life. It's also a guide to catching more greenlights and realizing that the yellows and reds eventually turn green too. Good luck.