In 19th-century France, artists were part of government. Artists are very sensitive to their time. They're very thoughtful people - it makes sense to hear what they have to say.
If you think of yourselves as helpless and ineffectual, it is certain that you will create a despotic government to be your master. The wise despot, therefore, maintains among his subjects a popular sense that they are helpless and ineffectual.
There is this sense of David Cameron leading a Government that's badly out of touch with ordinary people's lives. I'd absolutely welcome the opportunity to show all political leaders what life is like for most people.
In the United States, the government is bailing out banks, intervening in the economy, yet in Latin America, the Right continues to talk about 'free markets.' It's totally outdated; they don't have arguments; they don't have any sense.
My first novel, 'Man Walks Into a Room,' is about a man who's lost his memory and has to start a second life. On one level, it's about how we create a coherent sense of self.
Without any intended hubris, I've lead a pretty exciting life. What I've tried to do in Mission Compromised is draw on those experiences to create a sense of excitement and realism within the story.
Naturally I drew register a little exaggerated, in order to create something new in the sense of a sublime literature that sings of despair only in order to oppress the reader, and make him desire the good as the remedy.
Sometimes when things get kind of frantic, it helps to call my husband Steve, because I think he's got a real good sense of where everything's gonna be in a few years.
Right now, the biggest shared value that I can think of is that you should treat others the way you want to be treated, and just have some good sense about what matters to you.
It's very alarming to see what's happening in the Muslim world. And it's about time we come to our senses and realize that moderation is the only path that will ensure peace and stability for the Muslim world, and for the wider world.
When I am speaking about American presidents, I have to speak about my very special relations with President Clinton. He contributed more to peace than anybody else in the American sense.
All of imagination - everything that we think, we feel, we sense - comes through the human brain. And once we create new patterns in this brain, once we shape the brain in a new way, it never returns to its original shape.
In Japan, you have no idea what they are saying, and they can't help you either. Nothing makes any sense. They're very polite, but you feel like a joke is being played on you the entire time you're there.
From time to time I think I made some errors in judgment, but I have some really fashionable friends and I feel I've cultivated my own sense of style and what I feel comfortable with over the years.
Your senses are reeling all the time. Finally you find something to write and the very next day you go out and see something else which totally contradicts what you've written and every conclusion you've come to.
Reputation is fine but you have to keep justifying it. In a sense, it makes it harder because people's expectations of you are higher. So, you have to fulfill those expectations. Or, try to exceed those expectations. But, it becomes more difficult as...
Retaining a sense of control is really important. I like to do things in my own time, and in my own style, so an office with targets and bureaucracy just wouldn't work.
A period of time is as much an organising principle for a work of fiction as a sense of place. You can do geography, as Faulkner did, or you can dwell on a particular period. It provides the same framework.
I felt a sense of fulfillment that an action plan, which I'd laid on the table on the 2nd of February 1990, had been fulfilled, had been properly implemented within the time frame which I envisaged.
The novel that's contemporary in the sense of being wholly 'of now' is an impossibility, if only because novels may take years to write, so the 'now' with which they begin will be defunct by the time they're finished.
Usually I'll write all the way through to an end, and then I go back and try to fix the ending so that it makes sense. I don't think out the plot ahead of time.
