My mother brought me magicians and witches, because I was very ugly, really revolting. So she thought somebody had put a spell on me - this is the truth - so she made me drink some horrible terrifying potions, for year.
But in fantasy, you can make a complete break, and you can put people in a situation where they are confronted with things that they would not confront in the real world.
Ever since I was a little kid, whenever my parents would have company over, I would put on shows, whether they would be magic shows, singing shows, dancing shows, little skits.
Dickens never joined a political party nor put forward a political programme. He was a writer who rightly saw his power as coming through his fiction.
On the national stage and in the neighborhoods of New York, Senator Hillary Clinton has repeatedly put her expertise and power behind solutions that make the lives of the American people safer and more prosperous.
I had a blog for many years. Once you develop your readership on your blog, and you can put something out there or direct traffic or get attention - it's like a super power.
In my teenage years I was put off the idea of a career in flying, because I'd convinced myself that you had to be a boffin with degrees in maths and physics, which were my weakest subjects.
If the Administration does nothing, high gasoline prices will continue to increasingly burden our economy, taking millions of dollars out of the hands of families and putting it straight into the pockets of OPEC.
What an odd thing a diary is: the things you omit are more important than those you put in.
Most of us have had that experience - at around puberty - of realising that, despite whatever efforts we put into our chosen sports, we will become at best competent.
I'm an actress. In this sense, my profession is less complex than that of a model. True, they're into beauty in Hollywood, and it is age-related, but you can't put a girl with hot lips and no wrinkles and say: 'That's the mother of a 14-year-old.'
I never really enjoyed getting a portfolio together then sending it out; whereas, putting up the website is quite an enjoyable experience. The net's just a much faster and more modern way to distribute things, and you have to embrace it.
Everything we touch in our daily lives, including our body, is a miracle. By putting the kingdom of god in the right place, it shows us it is possible to live happily right here, right now.
The priests say that God created our souls, and that just puts us under the control of another puppeteer. If God created our will, then he's responsible for every choice we make.
In the theatre, as anyone knows who's even done amateur theatre all their lives, you immediately find a family there. Because you're under stress, you're trying to create something, you're putting on a show, you find brothers and sisters right away.
Ambient awareness is the experience of knowing what's going on in the lives of other people - what they're thinking about, what they're doing, what they're looking at - by paying attention to the small stray status messages that people are putting on...
I've had a lot of experience in independent film, and about how to choose. You've got to be very discerning about where you put your five bucks, and where you cut and what you don't cut.
Learn to reverence night and to put away the vulgar fear of it, for, with the banishment of night from the experience of man, there vanishes as well a religious emotion, a poetic mood, which gives depth to the adventure of humanity.
At Babbo, each dish grew out of a conversation, trying to put something forth that was new and different. It was a combination of culinary adventurism and the dining-room experience with respect for the classic but with an eye toward innovation. And ...
The boarding-school experience in Paris was very hard, I didn't put up with it very well. I was sick all the time, or in any case frail, on the edge of a nervous breakdown.
You just try and do as much variation and as much difference and as much as possible, so you put yourself out there to try anything, really. As long as you feel you're going to get something out of the experience, it's all worth it.
