When I was in college, I had the good fortune to have Joyce Carol Oates as my writing teacher. She told me that I could take an aspect of myself, and from that one bit of personality, I can create a character. This is what I have done, particularly i...
I honestly think that with our generation - Alex Wang, Prabal Gurung, Jason Wu, Christian Cota, Robert Geller - there's a different expectation of what our behavior should be. People expect designers to be good businesspeople and PR people, and I don...
Strengths are not activities you're good at, they're activities that strengthen you. A strength is an activity that before you're doing it you look forward to doing it; while you're doing it, time goes by quickly and you can concentrate; after you've...
For days on end, I avoid the Web, never logging in until about two or three, after I've written all morning. On a good week, I don't go online till after Wednesday, so four or five days might lapse without my checking e-mail.
It's interesting. I've known quite a few good athletes that can't begin to play a beat on the drum set. Most team sport is about the smooth fluidity of hand-eye coordination and physical grace, where drumming is much more about splitting all those th...
How much money you get, depends on lots of extraneous things. It depends on how good you are at turning poetry into a marketable product, which is something it was never supposed to be. That's why many people suppose that the better the poet you are ...
If something comes that it is so extreme that you have difficulty thinking of it as a good thing, don't think of it as a good thing and kid yourself. To the extent that you can, don't label it a bad thing. Refusing to label something a bad thing open...
I suppose a good director is like a teacher. I think that someone like David Cronenberg was very much like a teacher, because there's an openness, but a certain set of rules of behavior, and a certain conduct expected. But there's an atmosphere that'...
I was socially isolated as a kid. I had friends, but I wasn't very good at sports and that sort of thing so I became quite comfortable being by myself, exploring. The world was my private playground, and in it, I was supreme. Darwin, Faraday, Huxley ...
It seems always to have been difficult to have been a New York Philharmonic conductor because of the nature of New York. We are in direct competition with the great orchestras in the world who come to play in our hall or in Carnegie, and we are const...
I came seriously close to getting married four times, and each time I backed off in fear or for one reason or another. Each occasion was different, but in hindsight when I look at the people involved, it wasn't a bad thing what I did. I think it may ...
I loved cowboy films and TV series, and I learned bits of English from them. My favorite was 'Laramie', with Robert Fuller and John Smith. I used to watch 'The Lone Ranger', which had been famous in Japan as well. I idolized these cowboys.
The assurance of Heaven is never given to the person. And that's why at the core of the Christian faith is the grace of God. If there's one word I would grab from all of that, it's forgiveness - that you can be forgiven. I can be forgiven, and it is ...
There's no pressure; like Kate said, it is about carving your own future. No one is going to try to fill my mother's shoes; what she did was fantastic. It's about making your own future and your own destiny, and Kate will do a very good job of that.
Certainly businesses the world over are facing greater competitive pressure than ever before, and this leads to executive stress which, in turn, tends to bring out authoritarian tendencies in many bosses. To balance this, we now know a lot more about...
My skin still crawls if you call me a movie star. I get embarrassed. I think, don't be ridiculous. Maybe it's because I'm British. To me, Julia Roberts that's a movie star. But when people do call me one, that, I think, is an enormous compliment but,...
In one sense, the Internet is like the discovery of the printing press, only it's very different. The printing press gave us access to recorded knowledge. The Internet gives us access, not just to knowledge, but to the intelligence contained in peopl...
When we see animals doing remarkable things, how do we know if we're simply seeing tricks or signs of real intelligence? Are talented animals just obeying commands, or do they have some kind of deeper understanding? One of the biggest challenges for ...
Anytime you're going to take your Marines into harm's way, they are looking for leadership that is calm, assertive, sure of themselves. And quite honestly, I don't think that some of these young Marines care if it's a male or a female. They just want...
There's the assumption being made by the national security advisers to the Obama administration that the North Korean leadership is not suicidal, that they know they will be obliterated if they attacked the United States. But I would point that every...
Looking at the Batman pages is like revisiting my youth. My first seven years in New York were the first seven years of Batman itself. While my time on Batman was important and exciting and notable considering the characters that came out of it, it w...
