As a small child in England, I had this dream of going to Africa. We didn't have any money and I was a girl, so everyone except my mother laughed at it. When I left school, there was no money for me to go to university, so I went to secretarial colle...
I made 'Siam Sunset.' In Australia, it was pretty much universally hated, but I did notice that almost any American who saw it loved that film, so in 2001 I made a film in America called 'Swimfan,' and they released like a big studio movie, and it ma...
In Britain, the idea one could go from blue-collar beginnings to the university was so far out, it was quite unthinkable. I took a variety of jobs to pay for tuition - from ice-cream salesman to night-club bouncer. Whatever earned the most money in t...
I own about 300 pairs of shoes. When I start to go over 300, I have mini-sales from my closet and give the money to charity. It's my way of recycling; I feel like I can give back to the universe.
We can actually accelerate the process through meditation, through the ability to find stillness through loving actions, through compassion and sharing, through understanding the nature of the creative process in the universe and having a sense of co...
In the biblical worldview, the purpose of all creation is to benefit man. This anthropocentric view of nature, and indeed of the whole universe, is completely at odds with the current secular idealization of nature. This secular view posits that natu...
We tend to think of our selves as the only wholly unique creations in nature, but it is not so. Uniqueness is so commonplace a property of living things that there is really nothing at all unique about it. A phenomenon can't be unique and universal a...
We have reached a milestone in our understanding of nature. The discovery of a particle consistent with the Higgs boson opens the way to more detailed studies, requiring larger statistics, which will pin down the new particle's properties, and is lik...
That human beings seek their own well-being and that of those close to them is not an especially provocative discovery. What is important is that this universal aspect of human nature persists no matter what economic system is in place; it merely exp...
The universal utilization of water power and its long-distance transmission will supply every household with cheap power and will dispense with the necessity of burning fuel. The struggle for existence being lessened, there should be development alon...
One idea I explore in my stand-up show is whether, if you try looking at the universe rationally and avoid coping mechanisms like mysticism or religion, you can still be happy knowing you are going to die after a brief time on this spinning ball.
We're lucky in that channels like Science, Animal Planet and Discovery are essentially universal in terms of their appeal. If you wake up in Moscow and put on the Science channel, it doesn't feel like an American channel, it feels like their channel.
Novels written by university professors and set in the groves of academe are far more rigidly predictable than anything but the most routine science fiction novel, but they have escaped the stigma of being labeled as genre.
My latter schooldays and my university days were during the war, when science - physics, in particular - was a very important and glamorous subject. A lot of us felt that if we couldn't get into science, we might try engineering or medicine.
In 1986, I was asked by the then-Dean of Science at the University of British Columbia, Dr. R.C. Miller, Jr., to establish a new interdisciplinary institute, the Biotechnology Laboratory. I decided that it was time for me to start paying back for the...
I liked science very much. A science teacher in high school inspired me, and because of him, I began studying science at the university. But when I got there... well, the subject still attracted me a lot ,but I had to do all these exams, and it was j...
I'd always enjoyed acting at high school, and I was all lined up to do an honours degree course in biology at a Canadian university, and at the eleventh hour the drama teacher I had said, 'You know, you'll get a lot more girls if you go into acting,'...
I was nerdy girl who went to Catholic school and wanted to be an engineer. I was all set to attend the Illinois Institute of Technology. And then I took a hard left turn and studied Liberal Arts at Northern Illinois University, majored in Communicati...
I still really love the world and the universe and the mythology of 'Halo.' If I was given control, I would really like to do that film. But that's the problem. When something pre-exists, there's this idea of my own interpretation versus 150 other pe...
I love trade magazines - any trade's magazine: by entering into what is taken for granted in a world not your own, you better recognize the vastness of the social universe - for there are so, so many worlds that are not your own.
When I was a little kid - and even still - I loved magic tricks. When I saw how movies got made - at least had a glimpse when I went on the Universal Studios tour with my grandfather, I remember feeling like this was another means by which I could do...
