The Internet has definitely opened doors and leveled the playing field for musicians.
If you work hard and play by the rules, this country is truly open to you. You can achieve anything.
My mother opened a bank account for me when I made $60 on my first day of work as an extra. She's that kind of mother.
The theories of the French revolutionaries, as summarized by historian Roger Hancock, were founded on "respect for no humanity except that which they proposed to create. In order to liberate mankind from tradition, the revolutionaries were ready to m...
[Iain, addressing the Rangers at the end of the French & Indian war] "Never has the world see a war as this one, but you turned the tide of it, spillin' your blood to keep frontier families safe. Years from now, people will remember the Rangers, the ...
Nothing could go wrong because nothing had...I meant "nothing would." No - Then I quit trying to phrase it, realizing that if time travel ever became widespread, English grammar was going to have to add a whole new set of tenses to describe reflexive...
I could just as easily have taken the train.” He shut his eyes, just long enough for a movie of a Tess-induced train riot to screen on the backs of his eyelids. Fists flying, teeth broken, friendships destroyed as men vied to get closer to her lush...
You don’t say, “I’m sorry,”’ he says. ‘Getting injections, and experiencing pain, is part of life. There’s no reason to apologize for that.’ He seems to be channelling Rousseau, who said, ‘If by too much care you spare them every ki...
Louis-Cesare and Ray were in trouble. I could tell because I could see them, not clearly, but in fits and starts, little glimmers like a couple of ghosts, if ghosts made "oh shit" faces on the one hand agitated French gestures on the other. And that ...
A thousand years ago the Chinese had an entirely codified kitchen while the French were still gnawing on bones. Chopsticks have been around since the fourth century B.C. Forks didn't show up in England until 1611, and even then they weren't meant for...
On of the reasons that I wanted to study literature was because it exposed everything. Writers looked for secrets that had never been mined. Every writer has to invent their own magical language, in order to describe the indescribable. They might see...
Trevor realized that the odd thing about English is that no matter how much you screw sequences word up up, you understood, still, like Yoda, will be. Other languages don't work that way. French? Misplace a single or and an idea vaporizes into a soni...
You will die, and when you die, you will know a profound lack of it [dignity]. It's never dignified, always brutal. What's dignified about dying? It's never dignified. And in obscurity? Offensive. Dignity is an affectation, cute but eccentric, like l...
Two spacemen touching in anti-gravity is like a kiss. But then, there is nothing like a kiss. A kiss is a rare bird. The first sip of champagne. The fleeting glimpse of a shooting star. The kiss is uniquely human. We exchange bodily fluids with a kis...
Writing is a beast to tame, an energy to transform. Whip that toad into a prince and French kiss it to life. We start at the top but keep looking down, from macro to micro, from what could work to what does—but start with the dream. Nothing is real...
It was not the way Curve smelled that Colin liked - not exactly. It was the way the air smelled just as Lindsey began to jog away from him. The smell of perfume left behind. There's not a word for that in English, but Colin knew the French word: sill...
But here's something that I know about friendship: Sometimes the right thing to do is to not point out that your friend hasn't touched her chicken fingers or French fries and not point that maybe she's just overreacting. Instead, you just smile and s...
When art as an expression starts to appear, without prompting, all over the suburbs and villages of this country, what we are saying is: we are confident enough to create our own living, our own entertainment, our own aesthetic. Such an aesthetic wil...
Writers in what we now call the Middle English period (late twelfth century to 1485) did not necessarily always write in English. The language was in a state of flux: attempts were made to assert the French language, to keep down the local language, ...
I felt that he was a captive of financial and sentimental commitments, like every other man I know, and that he was no more free to fall in love with a strange woman he saw on a street corner than he was to take a walking trip through French Guiana o...
The German birds didn't taste as good as their French cousins, nor did the frozen Dutch chickens we bought in the local supermarkets. The American poultry industry had made it possible to grow a fine-looking fryer in record time and sell it at a reas...