If you're ever feeling a lack of middle-aged white men, just pop into the Capitol. Not so much the House of Representatives, which has a bit more color and texture, but the Senate -- jeez. Yes, let's have more testosterone running the country. Maximu...
Robert Burns enriched Scottish song with his genius and is mainly responsible for the rich treasure house of song that we enjoy today. He collected folk songs, retained the melodic line, kept what words were usable and rewrote the rest. He didn't cla...
With all of their benefits, and there are many, one of the things I regret about e-books is that they have taken away the necessity of trawling foreign bookshops or the shelves of holiday houses to find something to read. I've come across gems and st...
A new political-entertainment class has moved into the noisy void once occupied by the sage pontiffs of yore, a class just as polarized as our partisan divide: one side holding up a fun-house mirror to folly, the other side reveling in its own warped...
Well, Mark, I led the charge for five or six years to get reforms for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. I was chairman of an organization called 'FM Policy Focus.' What we were saying was, if there was blip in the housing market, Fannie and Freddie would d...
Oh, yeah. I grew up in Southern California in the 1960's. It was very different. I was an only child as opposed to having siblings. My brothers all lived with my step-mom. I am very close to them, but we were not raised in the same house.
My parents were both writers - they would type their manuscripts sitting side by side on the veranda of our house near Watford - so I wanted to do something different. I wanted to be a bluegrass singer, an architect, a landscape gardener, or to do so...
On the day I started college in 1979, no woman had ever been on the United States Supreme Court or served as the Speaker of the House. None had been an astronaut or the solo anchor of a network evening news broadcast. Not one had been president of an...
I grew up in a house where there was lots of teasing and language play and laughter; it was very important. When I was a teenager, you wouldn't go to a bar and find lots of televisions everywhere. People were talking. Talk was the mental fire you wou...
Ever since I was 7 years old, I was writing. I remember being in the basement of my house, this dank, horrible basement, putting on plays with not-very-willing participants, and I would promise kids in the neighborhood that I'd play Nintendo 64 with ...
What most people find festive—a weekend at a beach shack with friends, a boat trip down a river, a crackling bonfire on a summer night—I see as a bleak nightmare to be grimly endured. I would sooner put lit cigarettes in my eyes than share a vaca...
Redhead All over the house Strands of copper hair Like filaments from a cobweb Collect. If you and I Were ever to part— For months, perhaps years, I’d be combing out, Brushing or picking up Strands of significance, Traces of you In my life
There is nothing in the record of the past two years when both Houses of Congress have been controlled by the Republican Party which can lead any person to believe that those promises will be fulfilled in the future. They follow the Hitler line - no ...
Not long before my mother died, I found a long-lost portrait of Jane Franklin's granddaughter, Jane Flagg, aged nine - oil on canvas - in the basement of a public library not a dozen miles from my mother's house.
Mark Loring: Vanessa gave me my own room for all my stuff. Juno MacGuff: She gave you... your own room in... in your whole house? For your... for your stuff? Wow, she's got you on a long leash, Mark.
When I'm drawing, I'm drawing with the light, being completely open and creative. I can't draw in the evening. I need light and I need warmth if it is a summer thing, and I need cold if it is a winter collection. The good thing is that I have houses ...
I spent a lot of time in the White House in the public areas where reporters are allowed to go, but I spoke to people about the private quarters as well. Some of the things I learned were small, novelistic details. For example, the fact that there we...
Vicki Vale: What about *your* family? Bruce Wayne: Well, actually, Alfred is my family. Vicki Vale: You know, this house and all this stuff really doesn't seem like you at all. Bruce Wayne: Some of it is very much me. Some of it isn't.
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...
People sometimes ask who I would cast in my books and I never have any idea. I don't think I could ever write a book thinking of it as a movie the whole time. This would be like building a house and filling it with furniture just so you could have bl...
My production company wasn't doing well, so we were not producing films. Over a period of time, we have realized that we are going to produce our own films and make cinema that we like. We've got so much in-house talent, and my kids are going to be c...
