I always wanted to be a surgeon, because I had a lot of admiration for my father, who is also a surgeon. I also wanted to be a heart surgeon. That was motivated by the fact that my young aunt, a sister of my dad, died in her early 20s of a correctabl...
My mum is incredibly leftwing, and my dad was quite rightwing - no surprise they didn't stay together - and so I had two very conflicting political opinions as a child, neither of which I was interested in taking any notice of, being a sort of little...
Where I come from, you don't really talk about how much you're earning. Those things are private. My dad never told my mum how much he was earning. I'm certainly not going to tell the world. I'm doing well.
Growing up in Ohio and just being kind of an average guy from flyover country - my dad was a factory guy - I try to put things on a screen that reflect reality. I don't mind if people want to argue with that, or think that's crazy.
I went to see Dad in hospital after he had gone through one particularly grueling operation. I walked into the room where he was recovering, and he was sitting up in a chair, wearing his shirt and tie. That was after eight hours of surgery. I found t...
My Dad hated his job. He sold overcoats, but he wanted to make movies. He had a failed career working with the Ritz Brothers - they were like the Marx Brothers, only a tier below. I always had a picture in my mind of him in a straw hat.
My dad's cooking was magic in the kitchen. But eventually over the years, his personality changed and his ability to remember recipes failed. He became paranoid and thought people were stealing from him, when often he was just misplacing things.
Death is not an event in life: we do not live to experience death. If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present.
Here's a thing about the death of your mother, or anyone else you love: You can't anticipate how you'll feel afterward. People will tell you; a few may be close to right, none exactly right.
Democracy arises out of the notion that those who are equal in any respect are equal in all respects; because men are equally free, they claim to be absolutely equal.
The split between religion and science is relatively new. Isaac Newton, who first worked out the laws by which gravity held the planets and even the stars in their traces, was sufficiently impressed by the scale and regularity of the universe to ascr...
Given the tendency of many to picture God's realm as somewhere high above Earth - an idea that sounds suspiciously like the Greek stories of deities perched on inaccessible mountain tops - it may seem plausible to assume that astronomers have special...
I think the World Cup is going to be bigger than what a lot of people are anticipating. At this stage in my career, when there is an opportunity, albeit a small one, of being on the team, what a great way to possibly end my career.
For many years, our Messianic Jewish brothers and sisters have paid a great price. Other Jews have rejected them, and the Christian church would require they walk away from their traditions to fit into the Gentile culture. We must face these past wro...
The honor I feel today being inducted into the Hall of Fame is beyond what words can describe. My thanks to the Hall of Fame committee, who saw fit to bestow this great honor upon me today.
My favorite thing to do is still to go back to Peoria, go to my cabin and hunt with the boys. This is a great lifestyle, don't get me wrong. But fun for me is going back with my buddies I grew up with.
I have been very interested in the number of kids who have read the Sherlock Holmes books after reading the Mary Russell books. That's great. That's more or less how I rediscovered the Holmes books.
True basketball coaches are great teachers and you do not humiliate, you do not physically go after, you do not push or shove, you do not berate, if you are a true coach. If you humiliate or curse them, that won't do it. Coaches like that are not coa...
The tendency of modern scientific teaching is to neglect the great books, to lay far too much stress upon relatively unimportant modern work, and to present masses of detail of doubtful truth and questionable weight in such a way as to obscure princi...
AT&T Park, chalk it up. This is a great pitcher's park, great weather. It's a great place to pitch. It's all positive and no negative. You can go out and challenge guys. I've got the confidence to attack the strike zone and not nibble so much.
I would like to be a great artist. I would quit pitching if I could paint like Monet or Rousseau. But I can't. What I can do is pitch, and I can do that very well.
