There is good evidence that Venus once had liquid water and a much thinner atmosphere, similar to Earth billions of years ago. But today the surface of Venus is dry as a bone, hot enough to melt lead, there are clouds of sulfuric acid that reach a hu...
It just tickles me still when you see Roger Clemens, as great as he is, throw a split-finger and the hitter just swings and misses. They don't see that ball that well. Jack Morris threw an awful good one and Mike Scott. There's a lot of great pitcher...
It was a good 15 or 20 years before anyone at Rand would be in the same room with me. They didn't want the question raised, 'What's your relationship with Daniel Ellsberg?' And not one of them wrote me a letter because they didn't want a letter of th...
I guess I worry about weird existential things, like how do we spend our final act. This is a very emotional question. I can't answer it without crying. I think, You're 56 years old, what did you do? You raised two good kids. What am I going to do no...
All sorts of other lies are being spread today, I do not know what else they will invent. I've heard that I'm of Jewish descent, but I found, I knew of my ancestors in Zagorje from around 350 years ago, and I said, maybe it would be good to have some...
I spent many years writing and directing in radio drama, so I am comfortable with an audience or a microphone, but I do worry about the blurring of an author's public persona with the work itself. A good 'performer' can make a mediocre book sound str...
If there's a 13- or 14-year old kid who is yearning for something beyond the social forces in his own world, in his own neighborhood, the library is the only place where he can go to find that. It was exciting and thrilling to me all the time I worke...
I didn't have cable television growing up; there were only six channels you could watch then. The only really good channel was channel 10, and they would play 'The Nanny Called Fran' every night for years. I've seen every episode 100 times. I would g...
When I read James Joyce, I'm not really interested in the Dublin of 1904. I'm interested in being in the presence of a voice and a sensibility underpinned by an authenticity which, I think, if you're a good writer, you can extract from the specific d...
Flying into a storm, even its outer edges, did not seem like a good idea to me. And this was no ordinary tempest. Everyone on the bridge knew what it was: the Devil's Fist, a near-eternal typhoon that migrated about the North Indian basin year-round....
My relationships with both my mother and father are good. We spent several difficult years hashing over the problems and the past, and worked out a fairly solid middle ground. I wouldn't say my relationship with either of them - they're no longer tog...
All good ideas recognise opportunities and meet needs. Some variations on a specific idea can be protected legally in some countries for a few years, but no idea can be protected for long, and big ideas can rarely be protected at all. And since the i...
I'm sure that everything you do contributes to the sort of novel that you write. A lot of actors have an understanding of drama and a good ear for dialogue and also the rhythm of speech. Similarly, my 16 years in radio drama has influenced me. You on...
There was a moment when I was watching Martin Lawrence and Will Smith in 'Badboys' that I felt, you know, inspired. I don't know if I was proud, because so many people do the work. Everyone's part of a team that develops over the years and gives peop...
May I say, finally, that I have no illusions of grandeur; quite to the contrary, I am very humble in my knowledge that through forty years of my life my life has been an open book of service to my fellow architects and for the public good.
I loved doing 'Pennies from Heaven.' Because you have to understand that I'd been doing comedy for 15 to 20 years, and suddenly along came the opportunity to do this beautiful film. It was so emotional to me. I loved it. I don't think it was a good c...
I've been doing magic since I was five years old, and when I was trying to get acting gigs, I found I could make a good living at it. It's great to kind of shake the cobwebs off and get the feeling of a live audience again. I love close-up magic, the...
No, and in fact I get a bit frustrated, because I'm actually quite good at one-liners, and I've had hundreds of them over the years, and they sink without trace, and I get very frustrated. Every party conference I really work on the speeches, and I a...
Now that I think about it, I was arrested in 1992. Some people may think of that as a bad thing, but I feel good about it. I chained myself to the gate of a phone book factory, a GTE factory in Los Angeles. They were using thousand-year-old trees to ...
After so many books and so many years of writing, I have a good idea of my strengths and weaknesses. I love the process of writing and, if I allowed myself, I would write far too much every day. One weakness which I've struggled to overcome is my ten...
I think the Tea Party movement is great. I think anybody who has been frustrated over the last few years with the Republicans and Democrats, when they were trying to grow government and have spending and we weren't focusing on creating jobs and get o...