What is required as we travel towards full unemployment is not new legislation but a gradual change of mental attitude, a shift in values. As our taste for idling grows, we will refuse to work for old-fashioned bosses who demand a five-day, 40-hour, ...
I woke up on the plane this morning and was turning on my phone and I had to put my pin number in. That's when I realized that since the age of 10 I've been using 2012 as my pin number. But now that I've won gold in the 2012 Olympics, I've achieved t...
What's changed is we now have good anatomical, geological, archaeological evidence that Neanderthals are not our ancestors. When I wrote 'Lucy,' I considered Neanderthals ancestors of modern humans. We have gone back twice the age of Lucy, six millio...
I think about all my scenes. I do so much revising as I go along; I wonder how I could write books if I hadn't grown up in the computer age. I think I'd be a very different writer. I find myself cutting and pasting, changing things around, and deleti...
The reality of growing up is we changed schools so many times, my brother was my best friend. We have a five-year age gap, and my brother inspired me. He started boxing, and I just want to show that I could do things better than him.
Who knows what technology will emerge in the next five years, let alone 20. Yet the education we provide our children now is supposed to last for decades. We cannot train them for jobs that do not even exist yet, but we can provide them with the mind...
I feel very strongly influenced by long-form box-set TV drama... I feel really excited that, at last, the novel has found its on-screen equivalent, because the emotional arcs and changes that you can follow are just so much more like a novel, and so ...
I was very fortunate to have fallen in love with an amazing woman. She was killed in a very horrible, horrific way in Iraq. We can have this intellectual conversation about Iraq, and I can throw these numbers out there, but at the end of the day, not...
If the Frieze Art Fair catches on, I imagine at least two great things happening. First, we will once again have a huge art fair in town that isn't too annoying to go to. More importantly, Frieze may finally show New Yorkers that we can cross our own...
I've always believed acting is an improvisational art form, even when not a single line is changed. I mean, the behavior should always be improvised. My favorite moments in any performance are when I'm just along for the ride; when I'm surprising mys...
A translator, caught in the space between two tongues. Such people tend to come a little bit unglued from the task of trying to convey meaning from one code to the other. The transfer is never safe, the meaning changes in the channel — becomes tint...
For home had a way of shifting, of changing shape and temperature. Home was homeless. It could exist anywhere, because its only substance was familiarity. If it was broken by long journeys or tornadoes it emerged again, reinvented itself with new dec...
To maintain the P/PC Balance, the balance between the golden egg (production) and the health and welfare of the goose (production capability) is often a difficult judgment call. But I suggest it is the very essence of effectiveness.
Between stimulus, or what happens to us or has ever happened to us, and our response, lies our power and freedom to choose. In those choices lie our growth and happiness.
They [Nazi captors]had more liberty, more options to choose from in their environment; but he [Viktor Frankl] had more freedom, more internal power to exercise his options.
Never be daunted in public' was an early Hemingway phrase that had more than once bolstered me in my timid twenties. I changed it resolutely to 'Never be daunted in private'. - M.F.K. Fisher "A Is for Dining Alone
Time plays tricks on mothers. It teases you with breaks and brief caesuras, only to skip wildly forward, bringing breathtaking changes to your baby's body. Only he wasn't a baby anymore, and how often did I have to learn that? The lessons were painfu...
Ariel: "Why do such stories always sound so sad? Why can't people part on more amiable terms?" Danny: "Human nature," he said. "When feelings change and a person is at their most insecure, it's a matter of personal survival, I think. It's not always ...
I need to be a vampire," she said. "and I want one of them to make it happen. Michael will do fine. I don't care who turns me. The important thing is that if I change, I'll be a princess." I was wrong. She was really crazy.
Age doesn't arrive slowly, it comes in a rush. One day nothing has changed, a week later, everything has. A week may be too long a time, it can happen overnight. You are the same and still the same and suddenly one morning two distinct lines, ineradi...
No one doubts your courage, but you are a headstrong knight and when you choose a way you cannot change your course even if it lead to your destruction. That is your fault and your destiny.
