[last lines] Penny Wharvey McGill: Well, we need that ring. Ulysses Everett McGill: Well that ring is at the bottom of a pretty durn big lake. Penny Wharvey McGill: Uh-uh. Ulysses Everett McGill: A 9,000 hectare lake. Penny Wharvey McGill: I don't ca...
Ulysses Everett McGill: The old tactician has got a plan. For the transportation that is, I don't know how I'm gonna keep my coiffure in order. Pete: How's this a plan? How we gonna get a car? Ulysses Everett McGill: Sell that. I figure it can only h...
Over the years I'd lodged him in the permanent past, my pluperfect lover, put him on ice, stuffed him with memories and mothballs like a hunted ornament confabulating with the ghost of all my evenings. I'd dust him off from time to time and then put ...
Novelty. Security. Novelty wouldn't be a bad title. It had the grandness of abstraction, alerting the reader that large and thoughtful things were to be bodied forth. As yet he had no inkling of any incidents or characters that might occupy his theme...
Old English poetry is characterised by a number of poetic tropes which enable a writer to describe things indirectly and which require a reader imaginatively to construct their meaning. The most widespread of these figurative descriptions are what ar...
Language is a social energy, and our capacity for articulate speech is the key factor that makes us different from other species. We are not as fast as cheetahs – or even as horses. Nor are we as strong as bulls or as adaptable as bacteria. But our...
... he will seek vainly to the right and to the left and in the newspapers for a guarantee that he has actually been amused. For a sophisticated person, on the other hand, who is still unembarrassed enough to dare to be amused all by himself, who has...
Solitude, the safeguard of mediocrity, is to genius the stern friend, the cold, obscure shelter where moult the wings which will bear it farther than suns and stars. He who should inspire and lead his race must be defended from travelling with the so...
I was finally beginning to perceive that no matter how many dead people I might see, or people at the instant of their death, I would never manage to grasp death, that very moment, precisely in itself. It was one thing or the other: either you are de...
[T]here's a thin line separating the delicate from the bloodless, in art as in food.
Art is not in some far-off place.
Art, like dreams, helps our eyes to see what our hearts already know.
Art isn't meaningless... It is in itself. It isn't in that it tries to make life less so.
There was an age, however, when the transition from savagery to civilization, with all its impressive outward manifestations in art and architecture, took place for the first time.
There have been studies that clearly state that children who are exposed to arts education at a young age will in fact do markedly better in their SAT tests.
I was always involved in the arts from a young age. I started studying classical piano at age four as a student of the Associated Board of the Royal School of Music.
Like every art form, there are jealousies and angers and competitiveness in magic. But there's camaraderie among magicians, whether you perform it for a living or you're an enthusiast.
There are a lot of questions about whether architecture is art. The people who ask that think pretty tract houses are architecture. But that doesn't hold up.
The process I go through in the art and the architecture, I actually want it to be almost childlike. Sometimes I think it's magical.
At a certain point, I just put the building and the art impulse together. I decided that building was a legitimate way to make sculpture.
When I'm in London, Claridge's is a great favourite. I'm a big fan of art deco architecture and the rooms are extraordinary.
