I'm convinced that the world, more than ever, needs the music only you can make. And if it takes extra courage to keep playing in spite of your loss, many will applaud the effort. And who knows? Others may be inspired to pick up their broken instrume...
I went to a British Council event a while back and there were lots of German professors of literature. About half of them were convinced I had a German sense of humour and the other half were sure it was British. They are probably still arguing about...
The most difficult thing about living as a writer is precisely 'having to write.' Pretending to be a writer is easy. Living freely, reading many books, going on frequent trips, cultivating minor eccentricities... but genuinely being a writer is diffi...
I can't write a novel without first really doing reporting. I don't even call it research; it's reporting. That process is very important to the granularity of my writing. I have to know what the reality is so I can be more convincing in the writing.
I often hear actors say during their interviews: 'I want to play a crazy person, a murderer, or someone who's on edge.' But that question scares me. I mean, of course there are characters I'd like to play, but I can't really say specifically who they...
The pitch, timbre, volume, speed, and cadence of your voice, the speed with which you speak, and even the way you modulate pitch and loudness, are all hugely influential factors in how convincing you are and how people judge your state of mind and ch...
I am personally convinced - and I think the Greek people share this belief in a fundamental way - that we can achieve fiscal consolidation more effectively and we can restore competitiveness in a more fundamental and permanent way within the euro are...
How should a system convince people that they do not possess their sex properly? Teach them that in their possession it is shapeless and unconditioned. Only once it has been modified, layered with experts, honeycombed with norms, overlaid with pictor...
I wanted to quit the industry when I was eighteen and finish '70s', finish my contract on the show and go to college because I was pretty convinced that after '70s' and after being on a show for eight years that I would be very much pigeonholed for s...
Every now and again I just really have to have that steak or lamb chop. But yeah, B.C. - before cancer - I would eat red meat probably three or four times a week, easily. I am convinced that the amount of red meat I contributed to it.
Physicians today, as human beings, are not exempt from the perverse economic pressures created by fee-for-service regimes to see more patients for shorter appointments and order more tests and procedures. If the incentives were changed to pay to fost...
Most mental health professionals, including clinicians and researchers, endorse the deficit theory. They're convinced that we wage war simply because we don't know how to make love. We desperately want loving, satisfying relationships but lack the sk...
I love Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart because they're bringing irony back into American humor, which is a delicious treat. The entire Colbert persona of being extreme right-wing when he's not at all is highly amusing. He does it so well, but sometim...
I think airports are places of huge human drama. The more I see of it, the more I am convinced that Heathrow is a secret city, with its own history, folklore and mythology. But what has surprised me is the love the people who work there feel for the ...
I believe we all have the capacity to be masters of many things, and there's nothing that we can't do. You can be a great actor and also be a great writer. There's so many things that all of us have the capacity to do. But somehow, life tries to conv...
As a kid, I didn't need to be convinced the future promised peril and oppression, so when I started thinking up the middle-grade science fiction novel that became 'The Boy at the End of the World,' it seemed only natural to build the story around a d...
I grew up believing my sister was from the planet Neptune and had been sent down to Earth to kill me. I believed this because my sister Emily convinced me of it when I was a toddler. I think she'd seen Invasion of the Body Snatchers and her imaginati...
Around the late 1990s, I'd become convinced that one of the killer applications of robotics came from connecting robots to the Internet. The idea of solving generalized artificial intelligence was still far away, but heck, I could rent brains by hiri...
The Rio Earth Summit in 1992 changed my life completely, turning me into an activist. From the air, you see things you can't see from the ground - you really understand the impact of man, even in a place you know well. My work is meant to convince pe...
I am convinced that I do not want to give up more power to the White House, whether it's George Bush or Barack Obama. And I'm going to fight as hard as I can against President Obama on these earmarks and my Republican colleagues who hate to vote for ...
The person who has trust in divine justice is neither upset when treated unfairly, nor seeks his justice; on the contrary, he accepts the false accusations as if they were true, and does not try to convince others that he has been slandered; instead ...
