I've always loved history, from my youngest memories. My father enjoyed the great stories of history, like Hereward the Wake, Robin Hood, and Richard the Lionheart, and he shared them with me. I went on to do a degree in history, though I found it ra...
I care a great deal about LGBT U.S. servicemen and women being able to serve openly and honestly. Since early in my career, I've included realistic LGBT characters in my books. The idea that a gay Navy SEAL had to hide who he was in order to serve wa...
The thing about youthful offenders is that no one seems to care about them. Most people don't like adolescents - even the good ones can be snarky and unpleasant. Combine the antipathy we feel toward the average teenager with the fear inspired by yout...
If you are a good person, you will probably be a good father. Try not to worry too much. If you don't feel apprehensive just before your first child arrives, you are abnormal. Though catastrophe doesn't come as often in childbirth as it did a few gen...
I got a poster from Columbia Records, and there's Miles Davis, Charlie Mingus, Ellington, Count Basie - everybody in that poster has died, I'm the only one left. And great players like Paul Desmond and Gerry Mulligan, it's hard to believe they're gon...
You know, I said I have this problem that I need to more carefully read Akron's text because it's too much, too much fantasy, and so I am busy with other stuff - it's funny, it's nice to hear that someone is studying that carefully and now I know a l...
Paul like Jesus, shocked the guardians of Israel's law by his insistence on treating the law as a means to an end and not as an end in itself, by his refusal to let pious people seek security before God in their own piety, by his breaking down barrie...
If I'm walking down the riverbank, and a man is drowning, even if I don't know how to swim very well, I feel this urge that the right thing to do is to try to save that person. Evolution would tell me exactly the opposite: preserve your DNA. Who care...
The brain is the most complicated organ in the universe. We have learned a lot about other human organs. We know how the heart pumps and how the kidney does what it does. To a certain degree, we have read the letters of the human genome. But the brai...
To get our universe, with all of its potential for complexities or any kind of potential for any kind of life-form, everything has to be precisely defined on this knife edge of improbability…. [Y]ou have to see the hands of a creator who set the pa...
Block Watch, Crime Watch, we have hundreds of thousands of Americans, every day and night, risking their lives, going out for no pay as volunteers, protecting Americans like all of you and not asking anything in return. And the other day I'm speaking...
When I was young, I thought it was thunder that kills people. But when I learnt physics in St. Paul's High School, I discovered that it is rather the lightning that does the killing. The voice of the thunder itself is just a noise. The lightning is t...
Harry Potter to me is a bore. His talent arrives as a gift; he's chosen. Who can identify with that? But Hermione - she's working harder than anyone, she's half outsider, right? Half Muggle. She shouldn't be there at all. It's so unfair that Harry's ...
Semiotics is really interested in the questions like, what keeps you watching something, what keeps you - you know, what keeps you listening to a story on the radio? Like, what keeps you turning the pages in a book? What's the pleasure of it that's m...
When I was a bad writer, I would consciously imitate other NPR writers who I thought were wonderful. I suppose that everyone's artistic practice is different. But I collaborate and sometimes don't agree at all with my collaborators' opinions. It forc...
When I did 'Racing Demon' by David Hare, I worked with Paul Giamatti, who had stacks of books in his dressing room. I was offstage a lot, so I would go read in his room. He was reading a four-part series on the Byzantine Empire by Alexander A. Vasili...
In primary school in south-eastern Nigeria, I was taught that Hosni Mubarak was the president of Egypt. I learned the same thing in secondary school. In university, Mubarak was still president of Egypt. I came to assume, subconsciously, that he - and...
The process changes slightly from role to role. Obviously, there are different things you're called on to do. You're not digging deep for Basher Tarr like I was for Paul Rusesabagina, but at the end of the day it's still all make-believe and you stil...
Lt. Kinderman: You know who you look like? John Garfield. Exactly, John Garfield, "Body and Soul." Do people ever tell you that, Father? Father Damien Karras: Do people tell you that you look like Paul Newman? Lt. Kinderman: Always.
Paul Cicero: You know anything about this fucking restaurant business? Sonny Bunz: [Talking to Henry] He knows everything about it. I mean he's in the joint 24 hours a day. I mean another fucking few minutes he could be a stool that's how often he's ...
Paul Edgecomb: John, do you know where we're taking you? John Coffey: Help a lady? Brutus "Brutal" Howell: That's right. But how do you know? John Coffey: Don't know. To tell the truth, Boss, I don't know much'o anything.
