I was so inspired by Dr. King that in 1956, with some of my brothers and sisters and first cousins - I was only 16 years old - we went down to the public library trying to check out some books, and we were told by the librarian that the library was f...
It is our job to work for the government of the day and so that means working for Gordon Brown as Prime Minister, and we need to do those preparations just to be sure that we're ready for whoever you, the British public, elect and that's core to our ...
Somebody said to me this morning, 'To what do you attribute your longevity?' I don't know. I mean, I couldn't have planned my life out better. By all accounts I should be dead! The abuse I put my body through: the drugs, the alcohol, the lifestyle I'...
I made my first Australian senior team when I was 16, first Olympics when I was 19, and I retired. I'm 32, I retired four years ago, so a good third of my life or nearly a third of my life has been all about running.
I recognize that I had a good deal of good luck in my life. I came along at a time when it was pretty easy to get a job in journalism. I went to work at CBS News when I was about 22, and within a year or so was reporting on the air.
You know what I hate? I hate people who give me plants. The whole giving someone plants - it's like giving someone a pet. I'm giving you responsibility, I'm giving you a thing that you now have to take care of for, like, a year until it dies, and the...
Jack Crawford: I remember you from my seminar at UVA. You grilled me pretty hard, as I recall, on the bureau's civil rights record in the Hoover years. I gave you an A. Clarice Starling: A-minus, Sir.
June Jordan, who died of cancer in 2002, was a brilliant, fierce, radical, and frequently furious poet. We were friends for thirty years. Not once in that time did she step back from what was transpiring politically and morally in the world. She spok...
My father kept me busy from dawn to dusk when I was a kid. When I wasn't pitching hay, hauling corn or running a tractor, I was heaving a baseball into his mitt behind the barn... If all the parents in the country followed his rule, juvenile delinque...
I think the only time I doubted myself was my senior year in high school. I was not offered a Division I scholarship. I remember a scout from Ohio State coming in and looking at my film. He was all excited to meet me. Then he met me and I was 5'10" a...
I live for the Red Sox. I thoroughly enjoy them. For whatever reason, baseball has been a lot more fun for me in recent years. I loosely follow the Patriots and I root for them. I loosely follow the Celtics and then it gets to playoff time and I don'...
I took a break from acting for four years to get a degree in mathematics at UCLA, and during that time I had the rare opportunity to actually do research as an undergraduate. And myself and two other people co-authored a new theorem: Percolation and ...
The trick to acting is not to show off; it's to think the thoughts of the character. I was lucky because when I started acting, it was doing jobs above pubs. I learned to act in anonymity, so by the time people saw me, I knew what I was doing. I was ...
I like to mix it up, yeah. I don't sort of think, 'Oh, I need to do a comedy, I've done three dramas this year.' I don't think of it like that, but I definitely from project to project I feel like I want to just do something different all of the time...
I keep my skin - especially on my face and neck - out of the sun. My brother died of melanoma eight years ago, and I've got SPF on all the time, 24-7. It makes you realize, the sun is a wonderful thing, but it can be a very devastating thing. So suns...
The idea of stopping is not unmeaningful to me. I think there might be a time when, in theory at least, you'd say, 'Well I've mostly done what I want to do.' But how could you ever prevent a few years down the line some germ of an idea getting at you...
I'm a natural piano player. So all the practicing I do at this point is in my head. If I don't play for a year, my chops aren't going to get any worse. I've spent my time playing scales, and I don't necessarily want to play any faster than I play. So...
Scott Brown may be the last Republican to win a statewide fight in Massachusetts for a very long time. He caught the machine flat-footed in January 2010 when he out-hustled Martha Coakley and stole the Senate seat Ted Kennedy held all those years. An...
I started singing about three years ago, I entered a local singing competition called Stratford Idol. The other people in the competition had been taking singing lessons and had vocal coaches. I wasn't taking it too seriously at the time, I would jus...
There are those who advocate, and those who do. I'm not trying to slight my peers, but there is a difference between using a soapbox and actually getting your hands dirty. I've spent not only years and millions of dollars but hours and hours and hour...
Every batch of sperm represents an opportunity for genetic typos - called de novo mutations - to be passed on. A 20-year-old man and woman will each pass on about 20 de novo mutations to a baby they conceive. By the time the couple is 40, a woman's t...
