As a young boy, I was very interested - as I still am - in all sorts of adventure and exploration. I thought about being an astronaut, a dinosaur scientist, or marine biologist, but I clearly was drawn to the ocean and to the water.
I was really just the tea boy to begin with, or the equivalent thereof, but I quickly announced, innocently but very ambitiously, that I wanted to be, I was going to be, a foreign correspondent.
A boy's appetite grows very fast, and in a few moments the queer, empty feeling had become hunger, and the hunger grew bigger and bigger, until soon he was as ravenous as a bear.
A publisher should always be on the receiving end. He should take an interest in almost any subject and remain anonymous, letting the author take center stage.
I wanted to do pretty much a purely boy story, yes. The girls are kind of the bad guys in 'Marble Season', although that wasn't my intention. It's also a world without adults.
I said 'I was imagining you as a little boy, and as a teenager, and as an old man.' He said: 'I was looking at you and thinking how young you look, and how old at the same time.
I wanted to do a comedy. I'd been actively looking for a comedy. I wanted to do one that was different. Nothing against them, but I wasn't interested in just your normal sitcom, boy meets girl.
My early wounds were the English school system among other things. It wasn't merely the discipline, it was the ways in which boys got what was called the school spirit.
Academics have given up trying to recover an honest picture of the past and have decided that their history-writing should be simply an instrument of moral hand-wringing.
The boys and girls in the clique. The awful names that they stick. You're never gonna fit in much kid, but it you're troubled and hurt, what you've got under your shirt will make them pay for the things that they did!
You can tell the lowest class by their habit of always talking about persons; the next, by the fact that their habit is always to converse about things; the highest, by their preference for the discussion of ideas.
It's easy for me to go back to being a kid. You know how kids can be like savages before they get civilized? There's that sadist quality. Y'know, like boys who like to pick apart an insect for the sake of it.
My country owes me nothing. It gave me, as it gives every boy and girl, a chance. It gave me schooling, independence of action, opportunity for service and honor.
There was a whole display set up of all the X-Men paraphernalia. My wife couldn't resist telling this 5-year-old boy that I was Wolverine. The little kid looked up at me and he was staring at me.
We are incredibly heedless in the formation of our beliefs, but find ourselves filled with an illicit passion for them when anyone proposed to rob us of their companionship.
Imperialism was genuinely popular among Athenians who would expect to share in its profits, even if only indirectly and collectively, and not to have to bear its burdens.
Why can I write 'South' with some assurance that you'll know I mean Richmond and don't mean Phoenix? What is it that the South's boundaries enclose?
Dixie has just fallen to pieces. There are little patches of Dixie. But even in the heart of Dixie - in Alabama - Dixie is slipping. They've stopped using the word in commercial listings.
In the late nineties, Katy Grannan began making haunting photographs of people who had extraordinary inner yens to be seen by strangers.
I have never really cooked, don't know how to use my dishwasher, and subsist mainly on prepared deli takeout. I don't even eat in restaurants much.
New York being what it is, our museums are vertical, not horizontal. That means the stumbling blocks to architectural clarity are unavoidable - but certainly surmountable.
