If we want to live freely and privately in the interconnected world of the twenty-first century - and surely we do - perhaps above all we need a revival of the small-town civility of the nineteenth century. Manners, not devices: sometimes it's just b...
...ultimately it come down to, are you making or are you destroying? If you try very hard to create ways of living, create dreams of what is possible, then you win. If you don't, you may make a fortune in ten years, but you're not going to be read in...
I remember the first time I went to Italy when I was eighteen, I was in Florence and there were all these eighteen, nineteen, twenty-year-olds gliding past on Vespas with crinkly, long, hair, and I thought I was on the set of a movie. I couldn't beli...
Officer Hanson: Radio cheque two one L two three. Officer #1: Two one L two three. I'm hearing strange noises from your car. Officer #2: Likewise, twenty one, L. Is your mic open by any chance?
Bob Rusk: Hey, Dick! What about Coming Up then? Richard Blaney: No, I'm afraid I haven't any time. Thanks all the same. Bob Rusk: No, Coming Up, the horse. He won by a mile. Twenty to one. What did I tell you?
Sherif Ali: There is the railway. And that is the desert. From here until we reach the other side, no water but what we carry with us. For the camels, no water at all. If the camels die, we die. And in twenty days they will start to die. T.E. Lawrenc...
Prem Kumar: Final question for twenty million rupees, and he's smiling. I guess you know the answer. Jamal Malik: Do you believe it, I don't! Prem Kumar: You don't? So you take the ten million and walk? Jamal Malik: No. I'll play.
Private Henry Hook: [Throws Sergeant Maxfield across his shoulder] Twenty eight days field punishment! No pay! You know what he did? Sent my money to my Missus. [Slaps Sereant Maxfield's buttocks] Private Henry Hook: What did you do that for?
I could draw Bloom County with my nose and pay my cleaning lady to write it, and I'd bet I wouldn't lose 10% of my papers over the next twenty years. Such is the nature of comic-strips. Once established, their half-life is usually more than nuclear w...
I used to be really cute. I could send you earlier photos where I'm stunning. But I've gained about twenty pounds over the past two years, and the more weight I've put on, the more success I've had. If you drew a diagram of weight gain and me getting...
I spent all of my twenties feeling very angsty about trying to make a difference. I wanted to establish a touring circuit that would revolutionize the way subculture music was received in China. But now I'm older, and I don't feel as strongly about h...
John Fahey, thought during his lifetime to be possibly more than a little crazy, was the author of some thirty albums of gnomically introverted droning guitar instrumentals, which I listened to heavily in my teens and twenties; I even produced an hou...
Twenty years ago my parents wouldn't know who the X-Men were, and now everybody knows that stuff. It means that deconstruction of the superhero is something you can do. All those movies have led to a point where we can finally have 'Watchmen' with a ...
My mother's favorite photograph was one of herself at twenty-four years old, unbearably beautiful, utterly glamorous, in a black-straw cartwheel hat, dark-red lipstick, and a smart black suit, her notepad on a cocktail table. I know nothing about tha...
I pat the brand new twenty-seven inch Macintosh computers Mr. Foley brought us. 'These boxes alone should make both of us scream like it's Christmas morning! Snap out of it. Santa came! Now we get to play with all of our toys!
It was painful to contemplate the distance between the future of accomplishment I'd imagined for myself twenty years earlier...it was painful to understand that the cushion of exceptionality invoked by the drug had made me oblivious to my inertia. An...
It was painful to contemplate the distance between the future of accomplishment I'd imagined for myself twenty years earlier, and the reality...it was painful to understand that the cushion of exceptionality invoked by the drug had made me oblivious ...
Motherhood was a twenty-four-hour-a-day, all-encompassing job. It was the hardest job I ever had. Everything that happened to you [her child] happened to me. I had once heard children described in a novel as "hostages to fortune" and certainly my hap...
Twenty years ago, there were dozens and dozens of independent television producers. There are a couple now, at the most. Mark Burnett, Endemol. It's gone. Everybody works for the Man now. And it's natural law, how that happened: Nobody prescribed it,...
Depressed beyond what I'd previously thought possible, I stripped, showered, and slipped on a fresh pair of jeans and a tee shirt and headed for my mom's, trying to figure out why a bank would charge twenty dollars for insufficient funds when they kn...
Anchor It took twenty horses to lug me through the shipyard on the back of a cart like a fifteen-and-a-half ton pantomime dame. My spitting image was weighed on the other side of the bow: two fat men in drag; we felt as though no-one could ever bring...
