A memoir forces me to stop and remember carefully. It is an exercise in truth. In a memoir, I look at myself, my life, and the people I love the most in the mirror of the blank screen. In a memoir, feelings are more important than facts, and to write...
If we live a self-directed, self-motivated, self-centered life, always needing to get our own way, then we're going to be miserable. In fact, many times we believe it's our problems that are making us unhappy when, in reality, it's because we're focu...
'We Were the Mulvaneys' is perhaps the novel closest to my heart. I think of it as a valentine to a passing way of American life, and to my own particular child - and girlhood in upstate New York. Everyone in the novel is enormously close to me, incl...
The most terrifying moment in my life was October 1962, during the Cuban Missile Crisis. I did not know all the facts - we have learned only recently how close we were to war - but I knew enough to make me tremble.
Certain elements of teen life that, 10 years ago, were very important to me still, are becoming less so as I get older. I mean, I've kinda gotten over, I guess I'm saying, the fact that I had trouble getting a date for the prom.
The fact is that at different stages of your life, and under the influence of different inspirations, you write different things. The point is not necessarily to find your voice, which grinds out the same sort of thing again and again, but to find a ...
What the British seem to like are television historians and naturalists, not public intellectuals. You can't help feeling that's because one supplies narrative and the other supplies facts, and the British are traditionally empiricists so they/we hav...
We have a house in Umbria that we bought just before we went to America. That meant we couldn't go there as often as we thought, but now we're back, we're going to start using it more. I love the light, the countryside, the language and the fact that...
I absolutely believe that, come November 2012, I'm going to be governor of New Jersey and not in any other office. But the fact of the matter is, if Gov. Romney, who's going to be our nominee, picked up the phone and called me to talk about this, I l...
I can talk endlessly about characters, or why someone did this or that, and what that dynamic and interaction is. I really love it, and I think that actors really respond positively to the fact that I like to talk about that stuff, because I'm not su...
I've seen everything from 'Wicked' to 'The Book Of Mormon,' and I don't make any bones of the fact that I love both. But 'Les Mis' is not only my favorite musical, but it's also my favorite story. I love the book, which I read as a kid, and I identif...
Romantic ideas about the heart fly in the face of known fact, but that doesn't matter and never has. People many thousands of years ago knew that the heart is basically a blood pump, but that didn't keep them from also believing it was the seat of ro...
In China, Internet surveillance has already become a profitable industry. In fact, a growing number of private firms eagerly assist the local police by aggregating this data and presenting it in easy-to-browse formats, allowing humans to pursue more ...
The places and people in the following stories have been represented accurately to the best of my ability; yet my writing is supposed to be a tale, and as in any historical novel, my own imagination has blended with fact to create poetical reality.
It has long been known that the chemical atomic weight of hydrogen was greater than one-quarter of that of helium, but so long as fractional weights were general there was no particular need to explain this fact, nor could any definite conclusions be...
Great art is always a way of concentrating, reinventing what is called fact, what we know of our existence- a reconcentration… tearing away the veils, the attitudes people acquire of their time and earlier time. Really good artists tear down those ...
The shelves of many evangelicals are full of books that point out the flaws in evolution, discuss it only as a theory, and almost imply that there's a conspiracy here to avoid the fact that evolution is actually flawed. All of those books, unfortunat...
Freedom is essentially a condition of inequality, not equality. It recognizes as a fact of nature the structural differences inherent in man — in temperament, character, and capacity — and it respects those differences. We are not alike and no la...
Freedom is essentially a condition of inequality, not equality. It recognizes as a fact of nature the structural differences inherent in man -in temperament, character, and capacity - and it respects those differences. We are not alike and no law can...
Think you of the fact that a deaf person cannot hear. Then, what deafness may we not all possess? What senses do we lack that we cannot see and cannot hear another world all around us?
I think it was in Moscow last year and I got changed for training the day before we played Moscow, but the fact is they actually wanted to do John's, me and John were next to each other and they did mine by mistake. John had done them I think. So yea...
