I like using traditional beliefs in my fantasies, even though I always end up warping them to suit my purpose: it somehow makes everything feel more 'solid' if it's got a long history behind it.
Although prefabrication has a long history - the ancient Romans shipped pre-cut stone columns, pediments, and other architectural elements to their colonies in North Africa, where the numbered parts were reassembled into temples - the idea took on a ...
There's a thing at the Museum of Natural History in New York, where I live: they have a stairwell where you follow the beginning and the course of this planet, and it's a very long stairwell, and you follow, and you follow, and then you reach the top...
As every student in Philosophy 101 learns, nothing can force me to believe that anyone except me is conscious. This power to deny that other people have feelings is not just an academic exercise but an all-too-common vice, as we see in the long histo...
I'll do anything. I'll shave my head for the right job. I'm partial to my facial hair, I guess, but I also enjoy doing something where I look totally different, which is kind of the reason why I've always worn long hair. I can really change my look r...
Children are extremely perceptive and absorb what goes on around them long before they can talk or even comprehend language. They are like finely tuned receivers that pick up much more than is merely said. They are receptive and attuned to every mood...
Long practise in driving a racing car at a hundred miles an hour or so gives first-class training in control and judging distances at high speed and helps tremendously in getting motor sense, which is rather the feel of your engine than the sound of ...
The first piece of 'long' fiction I wrote was a novella parody of Stephen King's 'Christine.' I was in high school, and my version was about a kid with a possessed locker instead of a possessed car. It was also my first attempt at humour, which fell ...
I'm starting to think about things that I want to do, things that are fun. One of them is driving a car like a Porsche. I've driven a lot of cars - sedans, trucks and big family vehicles all year long. But there's nothing like a four-wheel-drive Pors...
Every day I'd come home after school, pop the hood of my mom's car, put alligator clips on the battery, and wire into the house and go play on my computer. If I used it for too long, I'd wear down the car battery, and my mom would be all mad at me th...
For a long time all I wanted for Christmas were books about outdoor survival. I was convinced that the woods were calling me. I camped a lot, I took classes. At 18, I told myself if I don't live in the woods by myself by the time I'm 25, I have faile...
It's funny how we 'do' Christmas. Christmas is not something that we do, it is something that was done. It celebrates the long awaited arrival of the Messiah, Jesus Christ. We had nothing to do with it, but what we can do is praise God for the coming...
If you pray enough for things, I am proof that they can happen. I feel like a kid on Christmas day now, every day. It's something I have wanted for a long time and I am as happy as anyone to be here. It is great to be back at my first love.
When my career first began, I didn't have children - so there's a whole lot of difference in the way I choose roles now. Not just films for my children, but how long I'm going to be away, and is Dad going to be home while I'm gone. That sort-of facto...
I think it's easiest to teach by example. My dad didn't tell us to work hard; we just saw how hard he worked. I know I have shortcomings - like a short fuse - but I've learned you can't come home from a long day of work and snap at the kids.
I think my dad did legal work for someone who had a Packard Bell 8088, and they couldn't pay him, so they gave him a computer. I was initially not allowed to touch it, but that didn't last long. I started tinkering with it, and there were many times ...
My dad worked for different companies that made whiskey for a long time, so we were definitely whiskey drinkers. Growing up, my friends would get toy cars, and I would get swag from whisky companies.
You can collect all the plastic bottle caps you want as long as you give me the money so we can get off this death trap, find somewhere else and have tremendous fun screwing that up as well.
You can lose people without them dying, and I have, from moving, from traveling. The emotion is real, it just doesn't actually have to do with death. I'm singing about what I know, and it's a song about longing for somebody who's disappeared in your ...
Marriage was defined by God a long time ago. Marriage is almost as old as dirt, and it was defined in the garden between Adam and Eve - one man, one woman for life till death do you part. So I would never attempt to try to redefine marriage. And I do...
When Katrina struck in 2005, roughly 300 deaths were recorded at hospitals, long-term care facilities and in nursing homes, according to a recently published study of death certificates and disaster mortuary team records. Many of them might have been...
