You can't really win as a Booker judge. If you choose the obvious names, the unit-shifters, you're accused of being timid and unimaginative; if you choose the unfamous, you're labelled willful and perverse.
As soon as you see 'Dame' in front of someone's name, you get nervous, but Dame Maggie Smith is the most wonderfully gentle woman I have ever met. She never had a bad word to say.
I've never seen radio as the minor leagues, where I'm just really preparing to be in the show that really counts, namely, television, which is, I think, what people often assume. I've never felt that way.
Experience is simply another name for the accumulation of all the mistakes we have made in our lifetime. Lesson after lesson we seek our obtainable level of wisdom and move forward.
I use the term bar-room to represent every means for the sale and traffic in liquor, and I earnestly appeal to the people to put an end to the traffic, no matter under what name or guise it may be carried on.
I sincerely believe that banking establishments are more dangerous than standing armies, and that the principle of spending money to be paid by posterity, under the name of funding, is but swindling futurity on a large scale.
Tuppence was what my grandmother nicknamed my mother, so she gave it to me. My sister is called Angel, and my brother was going to be called Bubba or Sonny, until they let me and my sister name him Josh.
Chaos is what we've lost touch with. This is why it is given a bad name. It is feared by the dominant archetype of our world, which is Ego, which clenches because its existence is defined in terms of control.
What I think the political correctness debate is really about is the power to be able to define. The definers want the power to name. And the defined are now taking that power away from them.
One of my lifelong hobbies has been to collect 'aptronyms' - the newspaper columnist Franklin P. Adams's term for people whose names were curiously appropriate to, or provided ironic comment on, their occupations.
Dear Mom, How can you hear me mumble under my breath but you can't hear me say "What?!" multiple times when you scream my name?
The summer I finished my first novel 'Ghana Must Go,' I drove across west Africa: from Accra to Lome to Cotonou to the deliciously named Ouagadougou.
Someone asked me the other day, 'What's the biggest influence on your filmmaking career?' And they started naming filmmakers. I went 'Naw, it's Jesus actually.'
The Internet community started forming right when 'Buffy' started airing, and the notion of a show creator being anything other than a name people recognize on the screen was completely new.
May our land be a land of liberty, the seat of virtue, the asylum of the oppressed, a name and a praise in the whole Earth, until the last shock of time shall bury the empires of the whole world in one common undistinguished ruin!
You hear all these stories about, 'There's one in a million guys that make it to the NBA and stay there.' To see people cheering for me and when they say my name, it's just crazy. It's still crazy to me.
I learned from the guys before me - Bill Cosby, Eddie Murphy, Chris Rock, Richard Pryor, just to name a few. These are guys that let it all hang out. What they lived is what they took to the stage.
My editor picked out the name she wanted. I was either going to be Kim Harrison or Lisa Harrison, because she wanted me shelved right next to Hamilton.
The last thing I ever wanted was to be alive when the three most powerful people on the whole planet would be named Bush, Dick and Colon.
In my 20s, I became obsessed with the role-playing game 'Romance of the Three Kingdoms,' named after a classical Chinese novel, and later 'The Sims,' a life-simulation game, and 'StarCraft,' a science-fiction game.
The word 'religion' has acquired a very bad name among those who really love truth, justice, charity. It also exhales the musty odor of sanctimony and falsehood.
