The defense of the West Bank by Arab forces would be a truly suicidal enterprise. The late King Hussein understood these facts well. Until 1967, he was careful to keep most of his forces east of the Jordan River. When he momentarily forgot these real...
Television has never known what to do with grief, which resists narrative: the dramas of grief are largely internal - for the bereaved, it is a chaotic, intense, episodic period, but the chaos is by and large subterranean, and easily appears static t...
One of the symptoms of an absence of innovation is the fact that you lose your jobs. Everyone else catches up with you. They can do what you do better than you or cheaper than you. And in a multinational corporate-free market enterprise, it is the co...
For what it's worth, I think perfect love stories have perfect disasters hidden somewhere. If a genuine relationship comes out of two people screwing before they saw the potential of the 'relationship'? Its perfect, beautiful, a work of art in fact.....
In fact I was slightly badly behaved at school and got in trouble. I would get a bee in my bonnet about something I thought wasn't right, and I would ape about too, to make everybody laugh. That was my way through my girls' school, because I wasn't v...
Cannes is a sort of gladiators' arena, and that's the fun part of it. When you accept to come here to open the festival, you know you are going to be criticised. I have no problem with the fact that I expose myself and the movie, and it's normal that...
This is one of the factors that also made me very much want to make this film, apart from the fact that I loved it. If the boy hadn't been Jewish and the man hadn't been Muslim, it wouldn't have made any difference to the film. I don't think it's rel...
The way I miss my daughter Esme is to worry about her. It is not a pleasurable longing. It contorts my body and scrambles my brain, makes me stop breathing, clench my jaw and my fists, it makes me frown, and makes me blind and deaf, in fact entirely ...
Becoming a writer is not a 'career decision' like becoming a doctor or a policeman. You don't choose it so much as get chosen, and once you accept the fact that you're not fit for anything else, you have to be prepared to walk a long, hard road for t...
Maybe being oneself is an acquired taste. For a writer it's a big deal to bow--or kneel or get knocked down--to the fact that you are going to write your own books and not somebody else's. Not even those books of the somebody else you thought it was ...
America pays its bills. It always has. It always will. The fact that Washington is now debating whether to honor its debts and obligations, then, should come as a surprise. But playing political football with a necessary vote to raise the nation's de...
I met Quincy Jones in Seattle. We were kids together... liked each other when we met and have been close ever since. He wasn't writing when we met - in fact, I more or less started him off to write; voicing, harmony, and stuff like that.
I think there's a culture in Rajasthan Royals that has been there before I got here, so I've come into it. I've enjoyed being part of it and embraced it. They are quite clear about the fact that bottom lines are important, and there is a certain limi...
I think looking back to my own childhood, the fact that so many of the stories I read allowed the possibility of frogs turning into princes, whether that has a sort of insidious affect on rationality, I'm not sure. Perhaps it's something for research...
The key to every man is his thought. Sturdy and defying though he look, he has a helm which he obeys, which is the idea after which all his facts are classified. He can only be reformed by showing him a new idea which commands his own.
Bin Laden always wanted to get rid of Mubarek and Ben Ali and Gaddafi and so on, claiming that they were all infidels working for America, and in fact, it was millions of ordinary people who peacefully, more or less - certainly in the case of Tunisia...
We know about man's impact on the ocean in terms of fishing and overfishing, but we don't really know much about what's happening underneath the water. And in fact, shipping has a role to play here, because shipping noise has contributed to damaging ...
To me, it's not necessarily about whom you vote for, it's more about the fact that you go out and exercise that right. There's a lot of people who fight for our right to vote and people in other countries fighting for other peoples' right to vote and...
It used to be that we disagreed over the basic facts we were fighting over, and we had different opinions about them. Now I think we accept different sources of authority. ... And people can establish credibility on their own say-so as long as nobody...
Santa Monica Bay is less polluted today than when I first moved to the area in the 1970s, because actions have been taken to avoid putting some of the noxious materials into the sea. I think people are more aware than they once were, the air is clean...
I bought myself a rubber brain, familiarized myself with its many parts, listened intently, and read more. In fact, I read obsessively, as my husband has told me repeatedly. He has even suggested that my rapacious reading resembles an addiction.