I was taking electives, and that branched into theater. Theater led to me taking a break during the summer between my junior and senior year. After I graduated, I ended up moving out to L.A. But in my senior year, I made it a part of my major.
Part of my motivation for writing mysteries for young people is that I loved mysteries when I was growing up, and now that I'm on the creative end of things, I'm discovering that they're even more fun to write!
The appalling crackdown that we witnessed in Hama and other Syrian cities on 30 and 31 July only erode the regime's legitimacy and increase resentment. In the absence of an end to the senseless violence and a genuine process of political reform, we w...
After I broke my leg I had to go back and do one of the remakes of 'The Magnificent Seven' and ended up on a horse that pitched me off and broke my leg again... I rode horses pretty well. I just didn't like doing it.
When I was about 12, I had my first paying gig - 8 dollars to play rhythm guitar in a polka band. Pretty soon, I ended up playing in all the bars within driving distance of Abbott, Texas.
You can pour holy oil and holy water on a thug until you have emptied buckets of both; but at the end he will be a consecrated thug, but a thug all the same unless interior intentions and a disciplined man are present.
I think that, at the end of the day, I'm drawn to a certain level of ambiguous storytelling that requires hard thought and work in the same way that the 'New York Times' crossword puzzle does: Sometimes you just want to put it down or throw it out th...
The big cop-out would be to accept popularity rather than opting to try to create potent work. It's so easy to do the popular thing, the expected thing, and that's where you start to cheat yourself - and your fans, in the end - because there's an inh...
I paint German artists whom I admire. I paint their pictures, their work as painters, and their portraits too. But oddly enough, each of these portraits ends up as a picture of a woman with blonde hair. I myself have never been able to work out why t...
Charles Schultz is a really interesting case. He wrote that comic strip and drew it himself from beginning to end, and it's a work of genius. It's very simply drawn, but it has some really deep emotions that you don't expect in a silly-looking comic ...
There are so many aspects of the game that you can work on - you can drive it father, you can drive it straighter, you can hit your irons higher and more consistently, you can get better with your wedges, and you can always putt better. There's never...
I lack confidence, but I've been so lucky the way jobs have come to me, and I'm so grateful for them. I know how many brilliant actors there are out there who aren't getting the chances. While the work is there, I will grab it with both hands. It cou...
There were no jobs created in America from 1945, when the war ended, through 2003. How could there be? Taxes were too high. Preposterously so under Eisenhower, Kennedy, Nixon, Reagan (who left office with a 28 percent rate on long-term capital gains)...
Journalists are in the same madly rocking boat as diplomats and statesmen. Like them, when the Cold War ended, they looked for a new world order and found a new world disorder. If making and conducting foreign policy in today's turbulent environment ...
The moment I said I'd finished a book, I knew what would happen. There would be a bidding war, and I would end up with someone who'd got the fattest wallet, who had bought it because I'd written Harry Potter. That would have been why.
Once Europe's colonial empires were sent into deep decline, thanks to World War II, America became globalization's primary replicating force, integrating Asia into its low-end production networks across the second half of the twentieth century - just...
I believe that if we think back to the period from F.D.R. through, let us say, Bush I, until the end of the Cold War, we lived through an artificial period in which American interests and European interests essentially dovetailed.
Humanity's legacy of stories and storytelling is the most precious we have. All wisdom is in our stories and songs. A story is how we construct our experiences. At the very simplest, it can be: 'He/she was born, lived, died.' Probably that is the tem...
Villanelle for my valentine Old love, I thought I'd never see the time because of all we've done and often said when I'd be yours, my dear, and you'd be mine. And what relief to soften, and resign the battle of the heart over the head. old love, I th...
When did my house turn into a hangout for every grossly overpaid, terminally pampered professional football player in northern Illinois?" "We like it here," Jason said. "It reminds us of home." "Plus, no women around." Leandro Collins, the Bears' fir...
Au temps de La Barbarie à visage humain, je disais, comme Camus : l'idéologie est un multiplicateur de massacres ; on tue d'autant plus, et en d'autant plus grand nombre, qu'on le fait dans la bonne conscience de hâter, ce faisant, l'avènement du...
