The celestial brightness of Pride and Prejudice is unequalled even in Jane Austen's other work; after a life of much disappointment and grief, in which some people would have seen nothing but tedium and emptiness, she stepped forth as an author, brea...
My ideas I can find anywhere. And I draw because I have to note down my ideas or flashes - I call them flashes, because they come to me, like that. Not so much in the plant drawings. I have to see them.
He specialized in a particular kind of friendship with that eight-limbed, inscrutable, treacherous creature, the happily married coupe, adapting himself closely and lightly to the composite personality. A peevish dead woman...it's absurd...ho much le...
Isn't that wonderful? When we drove through several of the places we lived - Grand Rapids, Washington - they all had those placards. That they stood by the street and had in their hands placards that said 'Gerald Our Ford'. That meant so much to us a...
I'm glad that I just played baseball, because I'm sure I had a much longer baseball career than I would've had a football career. I did miss football, but I didn't miss some of the injuries from football.
It's definitely weird, because pretty much everybody owns the Tony Hawk videogame. Just going over to people's houses and watching play me as I walk in - that's actually happened a few times and that's so weird. It's like, 'Dude, you're playing me ri...
So, then you find yourself in a situation where you have to do things because they're on offer to you, because you don't have much self-respect left. You just can't say no, even to something that you've never done before. You just can't help yourself...
I started my Twitter account for selfish reasons: I wanted to have a place to post updates on my book signing tour and stuff like that. I never realized that I'd have so much fun tweeting. It's become the deleted scenes for my DVD of columns and podc...
I am drawn, as a reader, to detail-drenched stories about human lives affected as much by the internal as by the external, the kind of fiction that Jane Smiley nicely describes as 'first and foremost about how individuals fit, or don't fit, into thei...
People like to stir up the fashion vs. costume world, and I think what they mean by 'too costumey' is that it's too much, or not real enough for everyday wear. You couldn't say that about John Galliano's shows, right? I mean, they're awesome, and the...
Picking locks or handcuffs for me is not really a big deal, I can do it pretty much in seconds, I've been doing since I was 14 years old. I used to sit on my bed as a kid with a pick set and you know just picking locks and stuff, so I'm used to it.
Any decision that's made about my career is ultimately my decision, and it's helped me not to plan too much. I've never been the guy thinking, 'I want to do a play this year, I want to do this kind of movie or this kind of character.' I don't have th...
That is why, no matter how desperate the predicament is, I am always very much in earnest about clutching my cane, straightening my derby hat and fixing my tie, even though I have just landed on my head.
If you compare the size of our reserves of Saudi Arabia and the whole Middle East, it's like three times as much as all of that combined and that's just the easily, readily available 1800 billion barrels and there are probably 3 billion barrels that ...
One way to prevent yourself from going through a considerable amount of useless pain is to see the truth of the following and then to act upon your discovery accordingly: judging others doesn't change how much they disturb you; it serves only to dist...
It's always easy to get people to condemn threats to free speech when the speech being threatened is speech that they like. It's much more difficult to induce support for free speech rights when the speech being punished is speech they find repellent...
When I was talking to strangers over the Internet in the 1990s, there would be a much more intense connection because they're disembodied, so it's just your brain and your soul interacting with this other person, and it just frees you up in this incr...
But even when the principle of equal treatment was betrayed, American leaders in every era have emphatically affirmed it, not so much out of hypocrisy as out of aspiration. Indeed, for those who were devoted to justice, the persistence of inequality ...
Because each work of art originates in the mind and feelings of a human being, it reaches its destination in the mind and feelings of another. A work of art, therefore, is a fact of consciousness quite as much as it is an object existing beside us in...
Right and wrong do exist. Just because you don't know what the right answer is — maybe there's even no way you could know what the right answer is — doesn't make your answer right or even okay. It's much simpler than that. It's just plain wrong.
I'm like a middle-aged person; when my friends go on about modern bands, I don't know what they are talking about. I'm into rock n' roll, like Jimi Hendrix. Not so much because of my parents, who used to play a lot of Nina Simone and older blues, but...
