Google is my best friend and my worst enemy. It's fabulous for research, but then it becomes addictive. I'll have a character eating an orange, and next thing I'm Googling types of oranges, I'm visiting chat rooms about oranges, I'm learning the hist...
We think the Mac will sell zillions, but we didn't build the Mac for anybody else. We built it for ourselves. We were the group of people who were going to judge whether it was great or not. We weren't going to go out and do market research. We just ...
Researching real people and doing them, I think, is harder than anything else. You don't want to do a caricature of them and you don't want to do an impression. You just want to do the best you can, in terms of presenting their views and a general im...
It was a show where you were given a quote out of current events and you had to identify who said it. I was reading eight newspapers a day and had compiled a file of about 300 quotes. I really had to do my research. The White House press didn't have ...
Even if the Bush Administration had flung open the gates to stem-cell research years ago, we would not be at the point of offering treatment today. Christopher Reeve would still have been taken from us. But we would be closer.
It takes 25 minutes to recover from a phone call or an e-mail, researchers have found, and yet the average person receives such an interruption every 11 minutes. Which means that we're never caught up; we're always out of breath, running behind.
One researcher just determined that African and Indian elephants make each other sick. When a new animal or plant is introduced to a habitat bad things happen. The biggest danger to native wildlife is foreign wildlife.
My very, very first professional job was when I was 19 years old - I got a job doing an educational industrial film on Shell Motor Oil's oil products. I really put my heart into it - I wrote a script for it, I did a lot of research.
Programmers and marketing people know how to get into your subconscious - they spend millions of dollars researching colors, shapes, designs, symbols, that affect your preferences, and they can make you feel warm, trusting, like buying. They can mani...
Anytime someone basically commissions a piece, I write a song based on something personal to them. I go online and I do research on that person - Wikipedia, YouTube interviews, anywhere I can find a piece of information that kind of tugs at your hear...
Virtual-reality researchers have long struggled to eliminate effects that distort the brain's normal processing of visual information, and when these effects arise in equipment that augments or mediates the real world, they can be that much more dist...
I spent 20 years doing research on regular and irregular verbs, not because I'm an obsessive language lover but because it seemed to me that they tapped into a fundamental distinction in language processing, indeed in cognitive processing, between me...
Historical fiction of course is particularly research-heavy. The details of everyday life are there to trip you up. Things that we take for granted, indeed, hardly think about, can lead to tremendous mistakes.
I'm thinking my next book should be set on a tropical island, which will obviously require days, even weeks of meticulous research, but I'm prepared to make that sacrifice. That's just the sort of dedicated writer I am.
What I'm exploring right now is the subject of my own mortality. It's an area that I'm curious about, and I'm researching it to see if there's a photographic essay in it for me. If images don't start to come, I'll go to something else.
I guess there's a sort of cycle with writing books. There's all the researching and then the imagining and writing - which is the real job - and then there's always a period when the book comes out and you have to lift your head and venture out.
So if I could just go back now to something which I am sure we should cover here regarding our original scenario: we have, in fact, four ways - four major potential lines of research.
Everything in 'The Tudors' is initially based on my historical research, and the fact is that the most unlikely scenes were the ones which were probably most based on reality. I prefer to be as real as possible, and there is so much of that story tha...
If caught early, Lyme is easily treated with antibiotics. But activists, and many researchers, have long contended that tens of thousands of people remain unaware that they have been infected - sometimes for years, during which the bacterium can spre...
I try to talk about policy issues intelligently, I try very hard to avoid thought bubbles. I make sure my speeches are well researched and footnoted. I make sure I am not talking through my hat.
Augustine says that you don't understand a nation by the throw weight of its military or the strength of its research universities or the size of its population, but by looking at what it loves in common. To assess a nation, you look at the health an...
