Lord of the Rings was something I always wanted to do. I read the book when I was about 25, and I was always hoping if it was ever made into a feature film that I would be involved in some way. And then I finally got it, and I was over the moon. It w...
Whether you are liberal or conservative, people seem to know the talking points for whatever the issue of the day is. Very rarely does it seem like these are opinions that people are coming up with themselves; it's like they watched the right cable n...
If you're doing something new you've got to have a vision. You've got to have a perspective. You've got to have some north star you're aiming for, and you just believe somehow you'll get there, which kind of gets to the passion point.
In my book, 'The Big Three in Economics,' I found that the press has frequently and prematurely written the obituary of Adam Smith and his free-market philosophy, only to see a new and more vibrant global marketplace reemerge after being savagely att...
If you subscribe to any online service, whether it be AOL, Google, Yahoo, or the Huffington Post, have you noticed that you are forced to watch a seemingly endless ad before the video story appears about a news item that caught your eye? AOL and the ...
I remember my own childhood vividly..I knew terrible things. But I knew I mustn't let adults know I knew. It would scare them. (In conversation with Art Spiegelman, The New Yorker, September 27, 1993)
It helps when 1 can send the children off to their fathers so I can support my new book with a national publicity tour. I started writing the book when my daughter was 5. It took me almost four years.
Why more reality-based TV? You'd think that after the first 'Survivor' it would have gone away, but it hasn't. The public demands it because they get all caught up in the personal stories and want to see more and more. Every new 'Survivor' is going t...
I think growing up in South Africa, and then moving to Canada, I'm just genuinely interested in the difference between the First World and the Third World, immigration, and how the new, globalized world is beginning to operate. All of those things ru...
Maybe we adults idealize our own red-rover days, the hot afternoons spent playing games that required no coaches, eating foods that involved no nutrition, getting dirty in whole new ways and rarely glancing in the direction of a screen of any kind.
The craziest thing is walking down the streets of New York and people recognizing me and asking for my photo. It has been pretty wild. I am used to getting spotted in ski towns, but I never thought it would happen in a place like this.
We should find inspiration in the senses that already exist and try to copy them and apply them to us. If we compare our senses to the senses of other animals and species that we don't have, we can get ideas for new abilities that we can adapt to hum...
So I've done my fair share of theater. I have also been very fortunate in that I've been able to come to New York two or three times a year just to see as many shows as possible. I think the live theater culture here is incredible.
These are stories you hear... of people sitting in a mall and being spotted, and you think it will happen to you. And when you're fresh off the boat, and new in Bombay, you want those kind of things! They are magical fables. You want to, somewhere, b...
My company invents all kinds of new technology in lots of different areas. And we do that for a couple of reasons. We invent for fun - invention is a lot of fun to do - and we also invent for profit. The two are related because the profit actually ta...
I don't know that we really think any thoughts; we think connections between thoughts. That's where the mind moves, that's what's new, and the thoughts themselves have probably been there in my head or lots of other people's heads for a long time.
Good and bad are illusions. What exists is either the presence of empathy or the lack of it. I think this should become the new, clear definition of how we see people. No more "good" and no more "bad". Those terms are highly subjective.
The short story and the truth is that I was taking vocal lessons here in New York... One day, instead of my lesson, the piano player and I went into a studio... and we put down some demos... Those demos got to Quincy Jones through an agent... He list...
Whether it has been supporting Corby's new free school, or fighting for the truth on the Cube overspend and land development deals, or striving to protect the East Northamptonshire countryside, in my work as the local MP I have always been struck, as...
People always say that Glasgow has had umpteen social problems but keeps finding ways of getting over its difficulties and transforming itself. Maybe, belonging to the city I'm able to renew myself too, and keep extending out into some new area.
Soon after the financial crisis of 2008, I was at a meeting in Washington with a group of U.S. senators. They had invited me to provide a point of view on new regulation; regulation aimed at ensuring we never have to go through the events of 2008 eve...
