The curtains of his bed were drawn aside; and Scrooge, starting up into a half-recumbent attitude, found himself face to face with the unearthly visitor who drew them: as close to it as I am now to you, and I am standing in the spirit at your elbow.
I always said I'm just an instrument; I'm transparent, like a medium, the language passes through me. Which is a bit like saying I'm a recording device, I start and I go. I had a real connection to ongoing, language production in real time.
I took a breath and let it go and suddenly the air was crisper and my lungs lighter and suddenly there was him saying my name in different ways and I catch myself throwing glances in the mirror, seeing someone I don’t know quite yet but I can’t w...
Maybe I`m getting to the age when I`m starting to be senile or nostalgic or both, but people are so angry now. You used to be able to disagree with people and still be friends. Now you hear these talk shows, and everyone who believes differently from...
Being what we are, rational but also animate, amphibians who start from the world of sense and proceed through myth and metaphor to the world of spirit. I do not see how we could have come to know the greatness of God without that hint that furnished...
I originally envisioned myself doing something with the suffix 'ology' at the end of it, like marine biology or entomology. But after I started to do some acting gigs, I thought it wasn't a bad thing... I said to myself, 'I might as well keep riding ...
With acting, I started very young, and I'd performed for a lot of children in boarding schools, late at night after the dormitory lights were out. I'd have a flashlight, and I'd be Count Dracula, or Shakespeare, or Yogi Bear, and leap from bunk to bu...
In theory, at least, all presidents are servants of the people who elected them. In the case of Barack Obama, it has seemed from the start that the idea as applied to him was more than mere metaphor. He is the first president in my lifetime whom the ...
At school I was lazy. But I started working when I was 15, washing dishes at a local truck stop restaurant. I was really, really bored with school, and I wanted to get a job as fast as I could. School was just so easy. There was just no challenge to ...
'Gorilla Man' is a composite of a few individuals, but the song itself was actually inspired by James Taylor. I spied his 'Gorilla' album laying on my floor and in some altered state, instantly started singing the chorus. It was fun to write. There's...
I'd grown up fearing the lynch mobs of the Ku Klux Klan; as an adult I was starting to wonder if I'd been afraid of the wrong white people all along - where I was being pursued not by bigots in white robes, but by left-wing zealots draped in flowing ...
When I started producing, it was George Abbott directing and he would let me do the scenery. He just wanted to know where the doors were - the entrances, the exits; the tables, the props - and then I would hire the designer. I took charge of the visu...
People can tell when you're happy with being you and when you're not. It's only cheesy because it's true. As I've gotten older and grown into my body, I've started realizing that the way you carry yourself and that light coming out of your eyes are t...
I suppose when I started playing guitar, it was the means to an end. I never thought of myself as a fully fledged guitar instrumentalist. And my early excursions on the electric guitar were curtailed when Eric Clapton came on the scene, and I decided...
Most people think confidence lies in an excessive rehearsal. It’s true that man has to prepare, plan and practice before projecting his purposes. But a time must definitely arrive when man has to put an end to learning and rehearsal and start pract...
I had no interest in being an actress what so ever, and when I was about 14 or 15, I was signed to a company in England. They owned a children's TV show which they put me in as a singer, and I was on the show for three years, and I left the show when...
I was about 14 when I started with a theater group; it was like a stage group on the weekends alongside school. And it was run by a group of guys who'd been to drama school themselves in London. So they introduced us to techniques that they'd learn a...
And I started with this: I have not painted at all my childhood. In fact, I never painted. But I helped my father who was a house painter and decorative painter. He made stage sets, he made glass paintings, he made everything.
The Beliebers have done some pretty crazy stuff. Last week, the night before I was due to do a show in Germany, four girls went into a dumpster so they could sneak into the building. They climbed in and hid. When the guys working on the truck started...
I'm very proud of 'Gavin and Stacey,' but I think I have to write something else even to start to consider myself a writer. Just because you do something once, it doesn't mean that's who you are. I played football last night; it doesn't mean I'm a fo...
When the first big paycheque with 'Dumb And Dumber' hit, I went: 'Gosh, I wonder if this will affect my performance. Will I do a take and think, was that worth $7 million?' But that never happened. If anything, it made me rebel against that thing whe...
