When every new wave of immigrants looked up and saw the Statue of Liberty, or knelt down and kissed the shores of freedom just ninety miles from Castro's tyranny, these new Americans surely had many questions. But none doubted that here in America th...
We don't really go in for big family dinners, but Scottish people are famously confrontational. It's a cultural thing, so maybe we don't need to have them to clear the air. Also, traditional family food isn't as nice here so there's no payoff for tra...
I was on a show called '12 Miles of Bad Road' with Lily Tomlin - it was an incredible HBO show. We shot 6 episodes, previewed it before the finale of 'The Sopranos;' it was written up as a 'Great New Show on HBO,' and then the whole thing was canned....
Somerset desperately needs more high-end music making on its doorstep, so the chance to share great music spanning genres as diverse as orchestral classics, trip hop and jazz, in the utterly relaxed and cathartic environment of a Somerset field, is f...
Being outside during the space walk, the view of the Earth is just spectacular, and getting a chance to do that is just unbelievable, everything about it. You are going around the Earth at 17,500 miles an hour, so you have 45 minutes of sunlight foll...
It still amazes me how many musicians aren't really interested in engaging with their audience at all. Alfred Brendel, a pianist for whom I have the greatest respect, has described performance as a sacred communion between the artist and the composer...
I was with the 101st Airborne Division in Iraq, really in the middle of nowhere, about 80 miles south of Baghdad. And it was almost midnight, and I got a computer message from the home office of the Washington Post asking me to call them. I did call ...
We lived in Northern Quebec, and the nearest school was thirty miles away, so my mother took on the task of home schooling me. She spoke to some friends, received some instructions from the provincial school board, and found some interesting books th...
Where I live in Connecticut was ice a mile above my house, all the way back to the North Pole, about 15 million kilometers, that's a big ice cube. But then it started to melt. We're talking about the floods of our living history.
People ask how hard it can be sitting down for work during a 500-mile race? Well, without power steering or power brakes, holding onto 650 horses in a car that has nearly 3,000 pounds of downforce and can produce up to 4Gs vertically and laterally ca...
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 ...
So for twelve miles I rode with Sherman, and we became fast friends. He asked me all manner of questions on the way, and I found that he knew my father well, and remembered his tragic death in Salt Creek Valley.
No one would say, 'Hey, I think this medicine works, go ahead and use it.' We have testing, we go to the lab, we try it again, we have refinement. But you know what we do on the last mile? 'Oh, this is a good idea. People will like this. Let's put it...
I went out to the desert where Cleopatra camped out with her mercenary army. It's a desolate outpost. Nothing has changed since her day. You realize how far she had to travel. Not only is it a good 150 miles against the current, you can't take a ship...
When I was in New York, I took my bike everywhere for transportation. I didn't have a fixed-gear bicycle, like a lot of the messengers do, but I had a stripped-down deal - having lost a few good ones in New York - and I did 10 to 15 miles a day just ...
When I'm on stage, it's really intense. My mind is going a million miles an hour, trying to remember my act, trying to say it all the right way. It's funny how different it looks and how it's happening. There are three Fellini circuses in my head, an...
The thing to keep in mind is that we're still in the very early days when it comes to the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. Saying there's a silence is a bit like if Columbus, looking to discover a new continent, only sailed 10 miles off the ...
We shot 'Dharma & Greg' six blocks from my house for five years. I had a Dodge Durango that I sold after five years, and it only had like 12,000 miles on it. My whole life was within eight square blocks of my house. There was a golf course across the...
Life has evolved to thrive in environments that are extreme only by our limited human standards: in the boiling battery acid of Yellowstone hot springs, in the cracks of permanent ice sheets, in the cooling waters of nuclear reactors, miles beneath t...
The life of any musician really doesn't fall into a normal schedule at all. Every week there are different rehearsals, different days and nights of performances, so we don't have a particular pattern that we can follow. For a conductor, it is a littl...
My grandfather had a particularly important influence on my life, even though I didn't visit him often, since he lived about three miles out of town and he died when I was six. He was remarkably curious about the world, and he read lots of books.
