I boldly assert, in fact I think I know, that a lot of friendships and connections absolutely depend upon a sort of shared language, or slang. Not necessarily designed to exclude others, this can establish a certain comity and, even after a long abse...
I used to go red when anybody spoke to me. It's awful because you absolutely cannot control it. If you are a child that blushes, or is shy, the one thing you want in the world is to be the child who comes in and says, 'Hi,' to everyone and goes up an...
I still have a stammer that I can control by not opening a sentence with a hard consonant, or by concentrating for a moment, breathing softly down. Growing up, the 'Our Father' was lovely, made for me, the 'Hail Mary' was gorgeous, and 'Glory Be to t...
In my day, MI6 - which I called the Circus in the books - stank of wartime nostalgia. People were defined by secret cachet: one man did something absolutely extraordinary in Norway; another was the darling of the French Resistance. We didn't even sho...
One of the regrets of my life is that I did not study Latin. I'm absolutely convinced, the more I understand these eighteenth century people, that it was that grounding in Greek and Latin that gave them their sense of the classic virtues: the classic...
The absolute base-level thing that you do as a new screenwriter is send out query letters. Literally, you just say, 'Hi, Mr. So-and-So,' and you give them a one-sentence description of one of your scripts. You send it out to a list of people you foun...
I am opposing a social order in which it is possible for one man who does absolutely nothing that is useful to amass a fortune of hundreds of millions of dollars, while millions of men and women who work all the days of their lives secure barely enou...
Yes, I'm a 'Twi-hard.' I became obsessed. Absolutely obsessed. I didn't watch television, I didn't go to the cinema. My friends would ring and say: 'What are you doing?' And I would say: 'I've just got to finish this chapter.'
You are perfect, right now, as you are. You are perfect, but incomplete. You are exactly who you had to be, to create the life you have right now, and there is absolutely nothing wrong with you or your life. But, if you want to be, do, or have, somet...
Presidents have absolutely gone against the will of Congress. Congress hasn't declared a war since December 7, 1941, and yet we've been at war ever since with somebody or other in order to justify the war machine. Now we have alienated almost the ent...
I don't really understand why everybody doesn't want to direct. It's an absolutely fascinating combination of skills required and puzzles set on every possible level, emotional and practical and technical. It calls upon such a wide variety of skills....
I would say that during my lifetime, one of the worst political scandals in Sweden was absolutely what happened surrounding the affair of the submarines in Swedish waters in 1982, where there were supposed to be Russian submarines close to Stockholm....
Accept everything, even if it's pain, even if it's sadness, because there's nothing absolute in this world. If everything were to disappear, at least I was thinking it didn't matter anyway. Even if in the future, everyone left me, it would be alright...
Not only that, but when I first met Joe, to my intense delight, he showed me that he was a collector. He was collecting some of the early Tarzan pages by Hal Foster, and, later, early Flash Gordons; and I found that we were both absolutely interested...
You get lonely, is what it is. A person's not supposed to go through life with absolutely nobody. It's not normal. The longer you go by yourself the weirder you get, and the weirder you get the longer you go by yourself. It's a loop and you gotta do ...
I remember growing up thinking that astronauts and their job was the coolest thing you could possibly do... But I absolutely couldn't identify with the people who were astronauts. I thought they were movie stars.
When I learned about the gray existing between the black and white of absolute terms, I began to experience more peace. The more I expanded my gray areas (more than 50 shades), the more peace I experienced in my life.
If you're going to figure something out, study ethics. You can ask What's the answer? What's Right and Wrong? What I learned is that nobody knows the answer and there is no Right and Wrong. So I'm incapable of becoming a fundamentalist because there ...
When I was a girl, the idea that the British Empire could ever end was absolutely inconceivable. And it just disappeared, like all the other empires. You know, when people talk about the British Empire, they always forget that all the European countr...
I had a longing for ritual, something I could cling to, a routine to make me feel well and contented. I hoped that reading Bible commentaries and theological critiques would nudge me closer to some kind of absolute that I could hold up as a torch to ...
I go out on the side of a hill, maybe hunting deer, and sit there and see the shadow of night coming over the hill, and I can swear to you there is a part of me that is absolutely untouched by anything civilized. There's a part of me that has never h...
