Fiction basically is a form of gossip where you want to enter other people's lives, the lives of people you don't know, and you want to know what's going to happen to them.
I'm a traditionalist with suits. It doesn't need extra pockets, and I don't want headphone jacks in my jacket. I appreciate designers who do different things, but for me, the most basic version of that item is what I want.
I'm very much in favor of focused responsibility, and so in the main areas that I'm worried about, I try to have a single person who is basically the key person in that area.
We have always tried to be guided by the basic idea that, in the discovery of knowledge, there is great entertainment - as, conversely, in all good entertainment, there is always some grain of wisdom, humanity, or enlightenment to be gained.
And the whole thing is that you're treated like a step-child. Here it was down here, everything in the black, because they were stealing, basically. Stealing from us old country boys down here.
E-mails, phone calls, Web sites, videos. They're still all letters, basically, and they've come to outnumber old-fashioned conversations. They are the conversation now.
The basic idea is always constructed around piano or guitar and a voice, that's what we live and die by, because if you build up from that foundation, it's going to be strong.
If you read my books, especially the Star Trek books and the Quest for Tomorrow books, you'll see in them the core theme of the basic humanistic questions that Star Trek asked.
I must stress, basically, the very fact that we do have orangutan rehabilitation means that we have failed to do what is really important, and that is rescue the wild orangutan in its habitat.
The dream would be to work with my two favorite actors, Daniel Day Lewis and Cate Blanchett. Or playing Joaquin Phoenix's brother in a film. Basically anything where I get to act opposite actors like these; ones who bring a certain caliber to their w...
In a way, I'm always trying to do something I'm not qualified to do. So I feel that lack of qualification. And I'm scared. And I have a tendency to think things may not/probably won't work out. That's my basic mindset.
At Mardi Gras, the different tribes will basically play war games, and so my brother is what you call a Flag Boy, which is more of less like a tribe's diplomat. He carries the game's standard and is really the line of where the game starts.
In searching for a rationale to go to war, Bush settled on the notion of Saddam as an incarnation of evil, basically, and convinced himself that Saddam was fundamentally Adolf Hitler reborn. I think his feelings towards Saddam were in fact quite genu...
I disapprove of matrimony as a matter of principle.... Why should any independent, intelligent female choose to subject herself to the whims and tyrannies of a husband? I assure you, I have yet to meet a man as sensible as myself! (Amelia Peabody)
[O]n general principles it is best that I should not leave the country. Scotland Yard feels lonely without me, and it causes an unhealthy excitement among the criminal classes.
To see others suffer does one good, to make others suffer even more: this is a hard saying but an ancient, mighty, human, all-too-human principle [....] Without cruelty there is no festival.
Few if any seemed to have grasped the Principle of Reality; new knowledge leads always to yet more awesome mysteries. Greater physiological knowledge of the brain makes the existence of the soul less possible yet more probable by the nature of the se...
The PC principle is to always treat your employees exactly as you want them to treat your best customers.
We must not offer people a system of redemption, a set of insights and principles. We offer people a Redeemer.
And it is change that always provides the opportunity for the new and different. Systematic innovation therefore consists in the purposeful and organized search for changes, and in the systematic analysis of the opportunities such changes might offer...
A well-known principle of human behavior says that when we ask someone to do us a favor we will be more successful if we provide a reason. People simply like to have reasons for what they do.
