Once upon a perfect night, unclouded and still, there came the face of a pale and beautiful lady. The tresses of her hair reached out to make the constellations, and the dewy vapours of her gown fell soft upon the land.
As I was working I noticed that the way I designed the differential gearing actually created a spare drive that sat directly below the emperor's feet, or where they would be if he were to sit in the chariot.
I really hate airport queues. I almost feel they should have cattle prods to hurry us up down the aisles. You can't even complain because they might stop you getting on to the flight.
I loved the Little Lulu stories, where she would fantasize that her bedroom rug would turn into a pool of water, and she could dive down into the center of the world.
Over the years it has been my privilege to lead performances with Saint Louis, the National Symphony, Cleveland Orchestra and so many other wonderful organizations.
I don't really think about retiring. I will retire just before people start saying, 'I knew Leonard Slatkin when he conducted well.'
The convergence of the Rhone and Saone. Paul Bocuse. The birthplace of cinema. Chateauneuf-du-Pape just a few miles down the road. It does not get much better than Lyon.
We could all use the power of prayer now and then, but it seems to me that the people who are sure they have a direct line to heaven are most often calling collect with bad news.
I wasn't even sure I'd be able to walk. I couldn't even go outside. Maybe I was just burnt crisp from the gruelling schedule I had been keeping for years.
I'd like to learn how to cook. I've hauled around this big, old, heavy Martha Stewart cookbook in my suitcase to Cape Cod, L.A., Paris. I don't know what possessed me.
The people you are closest to tend to be able to hurt you the most - that is why heartbreak is so hard to deal with, why death is so painful, and why fights can destroy things that matter.
What constrains or enables the capacity of human beings to work in groups is not so much the technology, but rather the capacity of the human brain to have and monitor social interactions.
Realizing the ways in which we humans may have been inadvertently changing our genes for millennia provides a way for us to begin to think about the inevitable genetic revolution in medicine that is going to allow us to advertently change our genes o...
I took business classes as a back up but I made movies all the time. I would get my classes done in two days and then spend the rest of the time making my movies.
I love people, and I love to be with people and to make music with people, but my natural state is to revert back to being by myself in my house, which is cool because that's where I practice and write and listen and study.
One of the things that amazes me about Twitter is the way it utterly eradicates artificial barriers to communication. Things like status, geopolitics and so on keep people from talking to one another. Those go away in Twitter. You see exchanges that ...
I take pride in taking care of all the housework so that my wife, who works as a designer for Martha Stewart, won't need to sacrifice any of her leisure time when she gets home.
I was at our beautiful home in Martha's Vineyard, near Boston, sitting on the porch looking at the ocean when I got a phone called and was asked, 'Would I like to do 'CSI'?' A week later, I'm at a coroner's office in Las Vegas, participating in a qua...
You know, people always ask me how I describe my music. First of all I tell them that's their job and then that also one day I hope to have things referred to as Martha Wainwright -esque.
I did spend a lot of time as a child very confused about whether I had a devil in me, or whether I was in a state of grace. I mean, these ideas are so potent to anybody with half an imagination.
If you're not working, over time you're much more likely to develop attitudes and orientations and behavior patterns that are associated with casual or infrequent work. And then when you open up opportunities for people, you notice that these attitud...
