I write because I know that one day I will die, and thus I should experience as many deliberate observations, careful thoughts, wild ideas, and deep emotions as I can before that day occurs.
I think, then, that man, after having satisfied his first longing for facts, wanted something fuller - some grouping, some adaptation to his capacity and experience, of the links of this vast chain of events which his sight could not take in.
If there is something I am arguing, it is a critique of science. Science has consistently denied the existence of consciousness other than human. Only in the last 20 years do we have acknowledgement of animal feeling or culture or experience.
I was with the CIA for only three years. I worked in the Directorate of Operations, which is now called the National Clandestine Service. It's the part of the organization where the spies live. I didn't have much experience beyond the training.
One, if you attack my integrity, I will defend myself. If you attack my patriotism, I will defend myself. If you come after my family, I will counter-attack viciously, I will destroy you.
It was an idea we had when Al was in the Senate - to organize and moderate an annual conference that would look at government policy through the lens of the family to help identify ways that the family can be supported and strengthened.
My family was in Singapore when the Japanese War started. We were in Singapore at the time of Pearl Harbor, and by the beginning of 1942, the Japanese invasion of Burma and Singapore had started.
This has been a learning experience for me. I also thought that privacy was something we were granted in the Constitution. I have learned from this when in fact the word privacy does not appear in the Constitution.
Melville brought to the task a sound knowledge of actual whaling, much curious learning in the literature of the subject, and, above all, an imagination which worked with great power upon the facts of his own experience.
I think you just assume that your memory is just sort of a video playback of your experience, but it's nothing like that at all. It's a complete refabrication of an event and a lot of it is made up, because you're filling in spaces.
When you grow up in a family of languages, you develop a kind of casual fluency, so that languages, though differently colored, all seem transparent to experience.
Writing a novel is an incredibly free experience. One puts one's self in a narrative mode. You can go off in any direction - the past, the future, or go laterally, or include one's own beliefs. It's total freedom.
I have two pairs of stretchy maternity leggings and jeans, which I will never give up, because once you experience an elastic band for a waist, you will never go back.
Six is the hardest number for me to experience, the smallest. It's the absence of something - it's cold, dark, almost like a black hole. If someone tells me they are depressed, I might imagine myself in the hole of a six to help me empathise.
My first memory - at about four - was of numbers. The doctors who study me think a combination of mild autism and seizures I had when I was three have made me experience numbers the way I do.
I try to create a challenge for myself in each book. And sometimes, believe me, I just kick myself afterwards, and say, 'Why on earth did you ever attempt this, you idiot!' But I'm always better for the experience.
The affairs of this world are so shifting and depend on so many accidents, that it is hard to form any judgment concerning the future; nay, we see from experience that the forecasts even of the wise almost always turn out false.
There is no winning or losing, but rather the value is in the experience of imagining yourself as a character in whatever genre you're involved in, whether it's a fantasy game, the Wild West, secret agenst or whatever else. You get to sort of vicario...
In 3-D filmmaking, I can take images and manipulate them infinitely, as opposed to taking still photographs and laying them one after the other. I move things in all directions. It's such a liberating experience.
No characters in 'Stay Close,' including the leads, are black and white. I want them to be grey. I think that makes for a much more interesting reading experience, something that will stay with you a little bit longer.
History offers us vicarious experience. It allows the youngest student to possess the ground equally with his elders; without a knowledge of history to give him a context for present events, he is at the mercy of every social misdiagnosis handed to h...
