Mummy weighed sweets and nuts so that everyone would get exactly the same amount. During the year, everything is measured roughly, but at Christmas, it has to be absolutely fair. That's why it's such a strenuous time.
So we're considering doing a new Christmas album, because there's been Christmas episodes since then, and maybe finally do the version of 'The Most Offensive Song Ever' with lyrics intact.
Every Christmas now for years, I have found myself wondering about the point of the celebration. As the holiday has become more ecumenical and secular, it has lost much of the magic that I remember so fondly from childhood.
I put the copy of 'A Christmas Carol' that my grandfather had first read to me 60 years ago on my desk, and I began to write. The result, for better or for worse, is the 'Christmas Spirits.' I plan to read it to my grandson.
I was born in Japan, so for me, Uniqlo is a family brand. My granny used to wear Uniqlo. And my Italian dad wore Uniqlo. I wore Uniqlo, of course.
The emotions triggered by fiction are very real. When Charles Dickens wrote about the death of Little Nell in the 1840s, people wept - and I'm sure that the death of characters in J.K. Rowling's 'Harry Potter' series led to similar tears.
The most enduring stories in literature generally have some kind of crime at their center, whether it's the bloody butchery of 'Hamlet,' the lecherous misanthropes of Dickens or the lone gunman from 'The Great Gatsby.'
I didn't even watch the soaps when I was in them because it's like a coal miner coming home and staring at the coal scuttle - I was never a great lover of watching myself act.
My wife and I just prefer Seattle. It's a beautiful city. Great setting. You open your front door in the morning and the air smells like pine and the sea, as opposed to bus exhaust.
Depend upon yourself. Make your judgement trustworthy by trusting it. You can develop good judgement as you do the muscles of your body - by judicious, daily exercise. To be known as a man of sound judgement will be much in your favor.
You know you're going to have a good day when your morning begins with breakfast in the same room as Carrie Tiffany, David Vann and Lionel Shriver.
Turtles are very stable and have been around forever. But they have problems adapting. When humans came along, turtles came under serious threat. Biodiversity is good, and I think it is good in technology as well.
I guess what I'm really saying is something obvious - that there's a unique pride in watching a home team from rival turf, especially when we're not supposed to be any good.
Our markets have not achieved their great successes as a result of government fiat, but rather through efforts of competing interests working to meet the demands of investors and to fulfill the promises posed by advancing technology.
I think somebody ought to do a survey as to how many great, important men have quit to spend time with their families who spent any more time with their family.
I suppose, the natural outgrowth about writing about two friends, it becomes about their friendship, and the complexities of it, and the way personality plays off each other, and what they each like to do, separately and together.
'Safe Harbor' is a state of mind... it's the place - in reality or metaphor - to which one goes in times of trouble or worry. It can be a friendship, marriage, church, garden, beach, poem, prayer, or song.
The lust and attraction are often a given in a romance novel - I want to dig into the elements of true friendship that form a foundation for a solid, gonna-last-forever romantic relationship.
My office walls are covered with autographs of famous writers - it's what my children call my 'dead author wall.' I have signatures from Mark Twain, Earnest Hemingway, Jack London, Harriett Beecher Stowe, Pearl Buck, Charles Dickens, Rudyard Kipling,...
I oppose any belief that contradicts experimental evidence as determined by the methods of science. All beliefs not in such contradiction may be considered as faith. Whether faith in a particular belief is beneficial or not is another matter.
Devotion, as it relates to the title of my memoir, means fidelity - as in fidelity to a person or a practice. I think it's certainly possible to feel devotion without having faith, at least in the religious sense of the word.
