In early 1970, Newsweek's editors decided that the new women's liberation movement deserved a cover story. There was one problem, however: there were no women to write the piece.
She had realized there are only fragments, that 'memories' always consist of fragments the mind puts together into a pattern, adapts a picture staked out early without the need for a conenction with anything that really happened. A great deal is misu...
Everyone knew the Hans Christian Andersen fairytale about the Sandman and how he brought sweet dreams to sleepers. An early, now-defunct Reve company had even used him as their mascot. But that's all the Sandman had been - a mascot. A little grinning...
Despite a lack of natural ability, I did have the one element necessary to all early creativity: naïveté, that fabulous quality that keeps you from knowing just how unsuited you are for what you are about to do.
I was interested in transcendence from a very early age. I was interested in what was over there, what was behind life. So when I had my first communion I was very disappointed. I had expected something amazing and surprising and spiritual. Instead a...
I never felt totally, 100%, patriotically English... I'd seen a lot of the world by an early age - sort of spent a lot of time traveling around Lebanon and I'd seen Babylon, and Damascus, and all sorts of places in the Middle East by the time I was t...
I would have loved to have been a footballer like my great uncle Matt Busby, but I knew quite early on that I wasn't going to make the grade. Luckily I was told by the age of 13 that I wasn't good enough. That's not a bad thing. You see this 'X Facto...
There ought to be more grants that go to people in their late twenties and early thirties. That's a crucial age, although it's very hard to judge who is worth supporting and who is not. Looking back on my own life, I see that was the period when I wa...
My love for American music and American movies is from an early age. I was 10 or 11 when I heard Fats Domino and Little Richard and Buddy Holly. And the movies, my dad used to take my brother and I to the movies every Friday. It was incredible: we go...
Early on I came to realize something, and it came from the mail I received from kids. That is, kids at that pivotal age, 12, 13 or 14, they're still deeply affected by what they read, some are changed by what they read, books can change the way they ...
I was born three weeks early, and I kept being ill. From the age of zero to four, I was always in hospital having tests done, but they couldn't find out what was wrong. They discovered that one of my kidneys wasn't working properly, and it had scarre...
As an author, you spend a lot of time by yourself in a room making clicky noises. It gets pretty insulated. You realize pretty early on in your career that even if this goes well, you could spend all your life in a room alone. Unless you pick project...
In my early 20s I was so miserable doing construction, I wanted something that paid money. I liked nice stuff. I liked cars and architecture, and things that cost money. I wanted to not swing a hammer, and make money... and not do stuff that was dirt...
Does art have a future? Performance genres like opera, theater, music and dance are thriving all over the world, but the visual arts have been in slow decline for nearly 40 years. No major figure of profound influence has emerged in painting or sculp...
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
If a solution fails to appear ... and yet we feel success is just around the corner, try resting for a while. ... Like the early morning frost, this intellectual refreshment withers the parasitic and nasty vegetation that smothers the good seed. Burs...
Deeply rooted in the universalist Western tradition of the Stoics and the the early medieval Christians, Tolkien created a myth to explore the nature of the human person against the avaricious dreams of the capitalists and the diabolical schemes of t...
The library was still giving trouble: a few books in some of the more obscure corners of the stacks retained some autonomy, dating back to an infamous early experiment with flying books, and lately they’d begun to breed. Shocked undergraduates had ...
When I was in my early twenties I didn't have a need to rub together, back when my life was a series of wants and whims. But recently I had felt overwhelmed by longings that seemed to lunge out of me in the most awkward situations.
Max - "...Do me a favor, if the constable comes knocking, tell him I was here all morning, will you?" Dodsley - "Killed someone again, did we?" Max- "Never before luncheon, Dodsley. It's still early yet.
Eustasia Johannsen was ready. Anyone could see that. Everything about her ancient self gave evidence to it: Her skin, wrinkled and transparent... But mainly, it was her eyes. They were drawn into her face as if her memories occupied more of her sight...
