Children can't help but create: they need to put their mind on the page, they want to paint, to sculpt, to write short stories.
Every creative story is different. And yet every creative story is the same: There was nothing, now there is something. It's almost like magic.
It is up to you to decide that this has lasted long enough, that our boys are dying to serve no British interest but for the interests of a small clique of utterly unscrupulous men.
Like 'Twin Peaks,' '24,' 'Mad Men,' and 'The Sopranos' before it, 'Downton Abbey' enriches the iconography and collective lore of pop culture. It replenishes the stream.
Female spies typically represented one of two extremes: the seductress who employed her wiles to manipulate men, and the cross-dresser who blended in by impersonating them.
I keep my old friends, and get older with them, but push young. It's good to be surrounded by kids, because they keep you young.
I have good legs, so I prefer my skirt lengths and my high heels. It's like my uniform.
Sometimes you think you aren't a good mama; you always feel a bit guilty when you're a mom. You want to be everywhere.
Here in France, I've seen some very good young designers, but they don't have this ability to be good businessmen, too. I think America gives you this.
There are a lot of good men's magazines. In England, you have 'Arena Homme+' and 'Another Man;' and in France we have 'L'Officiel Hommes.' But all are looking similar.
Tolerance, like any aspect of peace, is forever a work in progress, never completed, and, if we're as intelligent as we like to think we are, never abandoned.
I am not against marriage. I lived with someone for 11 years. But we weren't in love, and I thought that was quite important.
What it was at the time was literally a plea for, to get the pressure off for a while, to give her space to breathe. She was very unhappy. She was feeling pretty claustrophobic.
The only time I've ever taken out a loan is for the building work I had done at our house and I did that by extending the mortgage.
A novel is a collision of ideas. Three or four threads may be floating around in the writer's consciousness, and at a single moment in time, these ideas collide and produce a novel.
Oral storytelling goes back so long ago, and those stories that were told orally were always layered and changed with time.
There is sometimes a peculiar confusion in the West that equates progress to whatever is recent or whatever is new, and it is time we understood that progress has nothing to do with the chronology of an idea.
I was a library rat and a bookworm. I read all the time. I walked to school reading books. I read under my desk.
I have a hard time revising sentences, because I spend an inordinate amount of time on each sentence, and the sentence before it, and the sentence after it.
Writers, not psychiatrists, are the true interpreters of the human mind and heart, and we have been at it for a very long time.
Many of the architects of the Vietnam War became near pariahs as they spent the remainder of their lives in the futile quest to explain away their decisions at the time.
