I am a huge admirer of Elizabeth I, and this intriguing biography gives a wonderful picture of the era.
And that's why any of my picture books exist: They all seem to be built backwards from a simple, emotionally optimistic story beat.
Doonesbury had the requisite and overwhelming influence in 1980, as it did on any college cartoonist who was paying attention, of course.
Sentimentalist” is the abuse with which people counter the accusation that they are cruel, thereby implying that to be sentimental is worse than to be cruel, which it isn’t.
The constant assumption runs throughout the law that the natural and spontaneous evolutions of habit fix the limits of right and wrong.
I could probably give you a list of a dozen pet peeves I have about my own physicality and why I couldn't get a second date.
It's really very simple, Governor. When people are hungry they die. So spare me your politics and tell me what you need and how you're going to get it to these people.
In elections in Iceland, I have always been an abstainer. It seems like politics is such a small bundle of self-important people, who don't have much to do with things I'm interested in.
I'm not going to talk like I know about politics, because I'm a total amateur, but maybe I can be a spokesperson for people who aren't normally interested in politics.
One of the things that I think you see sometimes in politics is a certain degree of caution. It's usually advised by consultants who don't want to see you march to the end of a limb.
I did really well at school, and I would have loved to have gone to Oxford or Cambridge. I would have read English, and I'm really interested in politics.
Robert Kennedy was such an inspiring figure. His interest in politics seemed to come not from a desire for power, but from a need to help our society live up to its ideals.
I certainly wasn't a fan of Thatcher's politics. People liked to label us as children of Thatcher. What nonsense. The real children of Thatcher came in the 1990s, and had no interest in politics. The Oasis, Britpop scene.
I have very intense conversations with friends, people I really interconnect with. We talk about politics, important things. I like to talk about ideas and get people to be specific.
I mean that I think I find the psychology of people more interesting than politics. I think the psychology of politics is more interesting than straight politics.
Saying that the Palestinian people aren't really a people - that's not a zany thing to say. That's a psychotic thing to say in the midst of all of the politics we live through on a daily basis.
The minute somebody joins a committee... they immediately suffer from committee brain. They become wildly over-enthusiastic, over-optimistic, over-pessimistic. Committees turn people into idiots, and politics is a committee.
It's not enough to say that the Olympics is an athletic contest outside of politics, because it's not. The Chinese clearly are using the Olympics to recreate how they are viewed in the world and how they view themselves.
I don't think you should go into politics until you can stand on your own two feet economically, if possible, and you know enough about the world.
I've been lucky enough in 'The West Wing' and 'Brothers & Sisters' to talk about the issues that are important to me with none of the awful mud-slinging or public scrutiny you have in politics.
This idea that a book can either be about character and feeling, or about politics and idea, is just a false binary. Ideas are an expression of the feelings and the intense emotions we hold about the world.
