If you come from Africa with your economic poverty and your cultural riches, and you meet someone like Peter Gabriel or a person from a big record company, and they tell you that what you are doing is marvelous, that makes you feel powerful.
It's terrible to have to fear that your powers will activate at any given moment. Especially when you draw close to people... and find that your only choice is to pull away. It's overwhelming when you find a time, a person, with which there's nothing...
I wouldn't write about people who are living and who are close to me, because I think it's a very violent thing to do to another person. And anytime I have done it, even in the disguise of fiction, the results have been horrific.
I do my own analysis on the teams I am refereeing. I will know some of the personalities, the players who could be difficult customers in a scrum situation, the ones I am going to have to really work hard on early in the game to get what I want.
Don't try to be somebody you're not because it doesn't work. If you try to be this perfect person or perfect persona of what you think that somebody should be when they're involved in public office, it's just not going to work. Just be yourself, stay...
Whereas in the past optimism had been regarded as rather shallow - because 'oh well, it's just your temperament, you happen to be just a cheerful sort of person' - what I wanted to do was to establish that in fact it is the pessimists who are allowin...
We have different personalities and different skills and the kind of things that we do, we can do together that neither of us can do separately. We've been working together so closely that it's kind of hard to decide what's my work and what's her wor...
Chinese people become jealous about status more easily. Foreigners are more inclined to look up to successful people. I don't understand why there is a difference. If two people start at the same point and then one person gets ahead, the other should...
I am the least intimidating person. I think I would have done better in my career if I were a little more intimidating. Even the maid who comes to work for me once a week has found out that she can just trample over me... I'm a Cancer! We are not fer...
The point of my job is to entertain and make it look easy, so I guess it's the parts you don't often see which make me feel proud. All the behind the scenes work, the fears and insecurities I have to face and overcome to improve myself as a person an...
I'm an incredibly emotional person, but I always feel bad about that. The work is therapy... I need to emote wildly while I write. I weep. I'll laugh, get excited, and get up and pace. I try to take the emotional journey with the characters.
Personally, I feel that in my own work I wanted to look programmed or impersonal but I don't really believe I am being impersonal when I do it. And I don't think you could do this.
I also care that the public are getting their 12 dollars worth when they go to a movie, and that they're not coming out not wanting to ever see a movie with me in it again. I don't care what people think of me as a person, but I do care what people t...
I always try to do as much as I can do. I'm never a person that does not enough, because I'd regret not doing enough and think I probably could have done more. I probably go too far and have to reel myself back in, which works in some things, and oth...
A lot of guys are very intimidated by an attractive woman, and they dehumanise her because our culture perceives beautiful women as commodities. But I think if you're able walk up to a person and get to know them, and you see their flaws and their im...
In my 20s I was such a serious, boring-looking person. I would never do my nails. I never even danced. But I was taught by the women. They had gone through hell, but they would dance and sing. I came to realise I can't argue for a happy world if I am...
I fought as an infantry Marine on one of the Vietnam War's harshest battlefields. After leaving the Marine Corps, I studied law and found a fulfilling career as an author and journalist. But again and again, I came back to the personal fulfillment th...
We have but one flag, one country; let us stand together. We may differ in color, but not in sentiment. Many things have been said about me which are wrong, and which white and black persons here, who stood by me through the war, can contradict.
I really need to remember to block my thoughts." "Oh, come on," he pulled me closer towards him. "Why are you so scared?" "Because the second that I let this conversation happen, I'll be letting my walls down. No matter what answer you give me, you'l...
Boy, it began to rain like a bastard. In buckets, I swear to God. All the parents and mothers and everybody went over and stood right under the roof of the carrousel, so they wouldn't get soaked to the skin or anything, but I stuck around on the benc...
There were icons of the Magdalen on the walls and paintings in the Western manner, all kitsch, trash. Mary M., Lucas thought, half hypnotized by the chanting in the room beside him; Mary Moe, Jane Doe, the girl from Migdal in Galilee turned hooker in...
