That was one of the big problems when I was at Harvard studying music. We had to write choral pieces in the style of Brahms or Mendelssohn, which was distressing because in the end you realized how good Brahms is, and how bad you are.
Cooking a piece of fish and cooking it right. Knowing the fish, knowing the properties of the fish. That's a hard thing to do rather than covering it with a lot of sauces and foams or other cooking methods that might be high wire acts and look good o...
A good writer cannot avoid having social consciousness. I don't mean this about small pieces of writing, but about a big book. If it's a big book, there has to be more than one undertow.
A composition is always more than the sum of its parts. In other words, a really good piece of music is more than itself. It's sort of like a prism, which you can see from each facet a single totality.
I cannot give a single concert at which I do not play one piece after the other in an agony of terror because my memory threatens to fail me. This fear torments me for days beforehand.
A lot of people of my Ulster Protestant background would have been very suspicious of the notion of a film about Bloody Sunday. Our fear would have been that it would be terribly anti-Britain and anti-soldiers: a piece of nationalist propaganda.
Edward Snowden may not be a Chinese mole, but he might as well be. He's just handed Beijing a major score, while the NSA struggles to pick up the pieces - and the rest of us pay the price in terms of future national security.
Lately, I just let myself eat it more because I think, 'Oh, my God, a piece of cheese tastes so good'. I think it's your body telling you something.
People became more interested in my love life than in me, and that has a certain effect. You start to feel very empty and worth nothing, you start to become a piece in a board game you never wanted to play.
Once you start playing a piece, there is a connection between every note. You cannot say, 'I will not concentrate on this note.' You cannot ignore things the way you do in the rest of your life.
When I went to college at the University of Nevada back in Las Vegas, I got tricked into singing in choir. The first thing we did was the Mozart 'Requiem.' That was the piece that changed my life overnight.
I've never worn costume jewelry in my life. It's really very self-defeating. Why should a man buy a woman real jewelry when she wears false pieces?
If I have an hour in a city, I go to vintage stores first because it's so much cooler to find a piece that is unique. I love the thought of some girl having worn it before and living her life in it.
Gambling can turn into a dangerous two-way street when you least expect it. Weird things happen suddenly, and your life can go all to pieces.
I guess one of the reasons I'm doing the Poe piece is that I think Poe demonstrates that no matter how difficult things are, if you continue to move forward in life, you can eventually become victorious, even if it's later in life.
I couldn't write a female who fell to pieces every time something didn't go right in her life. She would just annoy me too much.
I usually feel like the role comes to you to sort of illuminate some piece of where you are in your life. I feel like I myself am a single woman and I'm childless - by choice - at this point, and I don't know what will happen.
I got a lot of paradoxes in my life. I guess I'm a real confused person, but there are some focused parts to my life now, and I'm slowly trying to put all the pieces back together.
Putting my words piece online was an important part of my plan to help women learn how to love themselves and have a better life.
Human-rights advocates, for example, claim that the mistreatment of Iraqi prisoners is of a piece with President Bush's 2002 decision to deny al Qaeda and Taliban fighters the legal status of prisoners of war under the Geneva Conventions.
Secretly, I'm in awe of Broadway performers. I would love to perform at that level. I love the exchange with the audience. I love being able to sing and dance to express your emotions and the community and friendships that are formed when working on ...
