They tend to be civil servants, often diplomats drawn from the Foreign Office, who may be very pleasant, intelligent people, but once they get inside the Palace they're riveted to the status quo and they lose track of public opinion in the real world...
Area 51 is located in southern Nevada desert about 75 miles north of Las Vegas. It's set inside a greater land parcel that's about the size of the state of Connecticut that's called the 'Nevada Test and Training Range.'
One of the few things the Air Force did admit to me existed out there presently without admitting that it was Area 51 is this drone called the 'Beast of Kandahar' which does not fire missiles, unlike the Predator and the Reaper, but just conducts sur...
I just play to the people I can see. So it's almost like you are playing to the first few rows of the crowd. You can see the faces of the first hundred people, but then it becomes a blur as the crowds disappear over the hill.
Clearly the human story is one of acceleration. There has been a Moore curve in terms of the number of people alive on the planet, our technological ability, and our ability to understand ourselves. We have had this extraordinary, explosive growth in...
There are many people who say, 'I write for myself.' I think that if you write and publish, then you write for your readers, not just for yourself. Many writers say that they write to be loved. I place myself among those writers.
What Ottawa and Washington used to think about Turkey or Iran was not very important because we really didn't think much about either, but now what we think about them is extremely important - to ourselves and to many other peoples.
It's nowhere near as intense as what I imagine an actor experiences backstage, but I feel a fluttering nervousness before a curtain goes up on a play. I mean, any play, anywhere - on Broadway or the Bowery or in a church basement.
I've read the 'Public Enemies' script and, no, it's not 100 percent historically accurate. But it's by far the closest thing to fact Hollywood has attempted, and for that, I am both excited and quietly relieved.
I see Obama as Sisyphus in the first four years. And nobody would speak about the size of the rock, or the elevation of the hill. All you hear people talk about is what he didn't do.
I mean there's certainly a lot of progressive rock and metal that exists at the underground level, which has its own vitality, as it should. But it seems to have lost its ability to really charge up the hill.
I've never been to a shrink. But my parents were very psychologically literate - my father had undergone Freudian analysis - and we often talked about other people in psychological terms, so I picked up a lot of that.
You know when you tell a self-deprecating story at a dinner party, everyone's laughing along with you? But then when someone else repeats that same story at another dinner party you feel they're all laughing at you?
I was once hired to write a column for 'The Guardian' and then got fired before I'd submitted my first one. That was unusual. Most newspapers wait until I've written at least one piece for them before firing me.
The person standing at the corner in the cold waiting for the ride is the most important person in the world and any transit system employees only exist for that person and act accordingly, above and beyond their own self-interest
When I was very small, maybe 8 years old, we had a big radio that stood on four legs, and it had a cross piece underneath it, and I used to take a pillow and crawl under the radio.
A beautiful city is Richmond, seated on the hills that overlook the James River. The dwellings have a pleasant appearance, often standing by themselves in the midst of gardens. In front of several, I saw large magnolias, their dark, glazed leaves gli...
At times, some journalists see nothing in the people apart from an opportunity to make material gain. They see them as consumers to whom we sell commodities at huge profits that keep our bank accounts growing.
In 1996, Al Jazeera was the first TV station in the Arab world to allow Israelis to appear on the screen and express their views and address the Arab world. Before that, Arab broadcasters did not allow what was perceived as the enemy to appear on the...
In Montana, when we did 'Return to Lonesome Dove', we rode on the side of a hill at night in the dark; I was afraid my horse would step on one of the actors playing dead. The director said to leave it to the stunt doubles since they got paid for that...
Now in India, a village boy who has worked his way up to work at a call center, or if he gets a job working even as a busboy in a Taj or an Oberoi hotel, he'll put on his wedding announcement with pride, 'Busboy at the Taj' or 'Call center, Office Ti...
