Adult Pi Patel: My uncle Francis was born with too much water in his lungs. They say the doctors swung Francis around by the ankles to clear the water out, and that's what gave him the huge chest and skinny legs that made him such a great swimmer.
I didn't really know anything about Margot Fonteyn. I'd never really been a ballet child, so I had no idea what an incredibly huge icon she was, not just in terms of a creative icon - she was also a style icon. I had no idea she was up there with Aud...
If you are the record label who owns Lady Gaga, and you have a new artist coming up, you can say, 'Let's have the artist play just before Gaga.' Now you've exposed the huge Gaga audience to the new artist. It's similar to showing a trailer before a m...
You see an absolutely brilliant film later, as an adult, and you walk out thinking about what to have for dinner. Whereas something like Jaws winds up having a huge effect on me. If only my parents had been taking me to Kurosawa films when I was eigh...
I was very influenced by The Magic Mountain. It's a book that had a huge impact on me. I loved that as a shape for a novel: put a bunch of people in a beautiful place, give them all tuberculosis, make them all stay in a fur sleeping bag for several y...
Last Friday night, I Twitted a photograph of myself that I intended to send as a direct message as part of a joke to a woman in Seattle. Once I realized I posted to Twitter I panicked, I took it down and said that I had been hacked. I then continued ...
I go on a hunting safari at least once a year to Botswana, which is fantastic because we have a huge area of wilderness entirely to ourselves. My island covers roughly 55 acres, which again I have to myself, with nearly half a kilometre of private be...
Some things change, and some things stay the same. The things that change are the things that I wish stayed the same, and the things that stay the same are the things I wish changed.
In any moment of decision, the best thing you can do is the right thing, the next best thing is the wrong thing, and the worst thing you can do is nothing.
Don't try and do the right thing, because there is no right thing; there's just the right thing for you.
The toughest thing to do in politics is to do the right thing when your supporters think the right thing is something else.
Fantasy football is not only a good thing, but a great thing.
Do not say the first thing that comes to your mind.
Whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report; if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, think on these t...
You can have too much of a good thing.
Efficiency is doing the thing right. Effectiveness is doing the right thing.
It's no big thing, but you make big things out of little things sometimes.
It's just that if you're not disruptive everything seems to be repeated endlessly - not so much the good things but the bland things - the ordinary things - the weaker things get repeated- the stronger things get suppressed and held down and hidden.
It doesn't make sense to have to do the wrong thing in order to do the right thing.
First things first.
She was not, herself, hugely in favor of motherhood in general. Obviously it was necessary, but it wasn't exactly . Even cats managed it. But women acted as if they'd been given a medal that entitled them to boss people around. It was as if, just bec...
