It's only by taking myself away from clutter and distraction that I can begin to hear something out of earshot and recall that listening is much more invigorating than giving voice to all the thoughts and prejudices that anyway keep me company twenty...
I look upon meself as... You take a band that's made up of arms, legs, bodies... I happen to be the piece that talks. And does all that area of it, you know? I'm also very easy to recognize; the darkie in the middle jumping around with the guitar, yo...
When you're taking a fence on a horse, you don't think much; your body does all the thinking, and you're over or you're not over. It's much the same when you are doing a tricky thing with a pen. There are times when I'm writing very, very fast.
I've just written a very gritty, non-magical take on the King Arthur legend, 'Here Lies Arthur,' and I'm currently toying with some other historical ideas, as well as working with the illustrator David Wyatt on some sequels to my Victorian space oper...
Take me to church I'll worship like a dog at the shrine of your lies I'll tell you my sins and you can sharpen your knife Offer me that deathless death Good God, let me give you my life
You have to keep challenging yourself. I've always tried to do that, and I'm not saying I've always been successful. Maybe I've rewritten the same song; it's inevitable, but I've always been mindful of taking the writing somewhere else. You can't sti...
The more I can make a person comfortable in their environment by taking my ego's hat off and leaving it at the door, then they can dive deep within themselves and we can pull out something interesting that people have never heard before. It's the stu...
Frank Sinatra took me to a whole new planet. I worked with him until he passed away in '98. He left me his ring. I never take it off. Now, when I go to Sicily, I don't need a passport. I just flash my ring.
Just blow in it and sound bad for about a year and then make it sound a little bit better, and you get a little band together, and then you get a few jobs. You take four guys that sound half bad, but if they're 25 percent each, they can give 100 perc...
I've done drives through Budapest and Oslo and used to drive to Sardinia, too, which is quite a journey. Drives are an adventure because I don't plan them too carefully. I take detours depending on how I feel and usually stop and stay at places I lik...
The Bible is not absurd for the people who wrote it; it becomes absurd when people in our day insist on taking it literally. The Bible does not present us with material that is ridiculous in the context from which it came. The Bible springs from the ...
I usually get up around 6 A.M. It takes me a while to get going. In our household, I am the first one up. I usually make coffee for myself, draw a bath and have a big soak. I read in the bath.
I kept being told, 'If you really want to build a start up, you have to be in San Francisco,' so I ended up taking out a suitcase. It did occur to me to do it in London but it's very, very difficult to build a start up in London - so I guess I was be...
There are several paths to success; We are given multiple opportunities to achieve our potential throughout our lives. Some get there a little faster than others. But one thing is for sure; NO ONE gets there without first having a goal then taking ac...
An author is a person who can never take innocent pleasure in visiting a bookstore again. Say you go in and discover that there are no copies of your book on the shelves. You resent all the other books - I don't care if they are Great Expectations, L...
I still like to keep tapes of the few minutes before the final take, things that happen before the session. Maybe it's superstitious, but I believe if I had done things differently - if I had walked around the studio or gone out - it wouldn't have tu...
The first thing I became interested in in terms of 'Brain Storm' was neuroscience, and that is like saying you're interested in the universe. So ultimately I knew if I was going to handle this in a fictional format, I would have to take a subsection ...
It cannot be denied that has had many exceptional ideas, and that is a highly intelligent man. For my part, however, I have always been taught to take a broad overview of things, in order to be able to deduce from them general rules, which might be a...
Mostly I'm writing about people, so I feel constrained to take with me my view of people, my curiosity about how people choose the things they do and why they come to certain decisions in a certain fashion and all the things that drive most writers.
It took us years to get into the mess that we got ourselves in at the end of 2008, and it's going to take a while to get us out. We lost eight million jobs, we saw a financial system near collapse, we have a continuing housing crisis that we're makin...
But give thanks, at least, that you still have Frost's poems; and when you feel the need of solitude, retreat to the companionship of moon, water, hills and trees. Retreat, he reminds us, should not be confused with escape. And take these poems along...
