My parents and grandparents have always been engaged in teaching or the medical profession or the priesthood, so I've sort of grown up with a sense of complicity in the lives of other people, so there's no virtue in that; it's the way one is raised.
I think what medical training does is it gives you the language, the tools to look up facts. I think medical training gives you a sense of how to approach a problem, how to look at symptoms and go down the list of what it might be.
I'm pretty horrible at relationships and haven't been in many long-term ones. Leaving and moving on - returning to a familiar sense of self-reliance and autonomy - is what I know; that feeling is as comfortable and comforting as it might be for a dif...
You'll see that the strong, the affirmative, the positive voice in any of the plays I've written is that of a woman. My men are, well, not quite worthless, but they are certainly weak, and that reflects the reality I grew up with and what I think has...
I think that still, for the most part, even in 2010, the vast majority of museum shows and gallery shows and gallerists are pretty much dominated by men. So having a sense of what women are up to, for me, frankly, is very, very important.
All the research shows that being married, with all its ups and downs, is by far the most effective way of making young men law-abiding and giving them a sense of purpose and self-worth.
The go-to reflex all over Hollywood is still likeability. I've always had a problem with it because I think I have a weird barometer in the sense that some of the characters I've cared about the most in movies are characters that are often thought of...
There have been 14 versions that I can find of Burke & Hare movies. They have all been horror films and all the movies have taken place in Victorian times, which doesn't make any sense.
In anything I've ever written, all the characters sound like me, which I don't think is a bad thing. It makes sense. But I had always admired filmmakers who made movies that didn't sound like them at all.
Clint Barton: The city is flying and we're fighting an army of robots. And I have a bow and arrow. Nothing makes sense.
Having plenty of living space has to be the greatest luxury in a city, and I guess in some sense Bombay is the antithesis of what living in Canada must be.
[defines a madman as] a man who preferred to become mad,in the socially accepted sense of the word, rather than forfeit a certain superior idea of human honor.
It's interesting because you feel on the one hand, we understand people from what the say, and in another sense, you'd think that you'd be able to convey more through dialogue.
I don't like being called 'macho.' Macho basically means stupid and a real Italian man is not macho, he's smart. That's smart in both senses: elegant and clever.
Our sense of what is valuable will hence be radically distorted if we must perpetually condemn as tedious everything we lack, simply because we lack it.
Marriage is not a ritual or an end. It is a long, intricate, intimate dance together and nothing matters more than your own sense of balance and your choice of partner.
What sense is there in pain at all—however we contrive it for ourselves as we cast about for ways to bind up the wound between us and God?
I'm not a religious person in the regular sense, but in the Bible you're not allowed to steal, you're not allowed to lie and you're not allowed to feel you're above other people.
There often is a dark secret in books... There is often a gathering sense of dread; there's a gap sometimes in the text from which all kinds of monsters can emerge.
It would be possible to describe everything scientifically, but it would make no sense; it would be without meaning, as if you described a Beethoven symphony as a variation of wave pressure.
I don't try to imagine a personal God; it suffices to stand in awe at the structure of the world, insofar as it allows our inadequate senses to appreciate it.
