The interesting thing about history sometimes. is that you know these people existed, and you knew what jobs they did, but you don't know much about them as people, so you actually have to make them up.
I was, from early on, interested in science. And my parents were very obliging about that. My father used to take me to the museum of natural history, and I knew much more scientific stuff early on. From the time I was 11 or 12, I wanted to be a math...
Many climate change deniers would have you believe that addressing climate change is all pain and no gain. This is simply not true. We can tackle this challenge while improving our personal health and the health of our economy. These are not competin...
My work was fairly theoretical. It was in recursive function theory. And in particular, hierarchies of functions in terms of computational complexity. I got involved in real computers and programming mainly by being - well, I was interested even as I...
I have mixed feelings about 'Car 54, Where Are You?' Because we shot it as a musical and whoever the studio head was at Orion, or whoever the powers that be were, cut all but, like, two musical numbers out of it. That is the same as cutting the music...
I had the notion that, OK, so now we have all of this wealth, we could buy not only one expensive car, we could buy all of them. As soon as you realize that you could buy all of them, then none of them are particularly interesting or satisfying.
I get labelled as just being about one thing, but there's lots of layers to what I do. It's just lazy journalism, but people start to accept it. If people spent an hour in my car driving around London and listening to the stuff I listen to, they'd he...
When I was six years old, I fell in love with magic. For Christmas, I got a magic box and a very old book on card manipulation. Somehow, I was more interested in pure manipulation than in all the silly little tricks in the box.
My dad was a composer and a musician, but he never finished high school. His formal education was rather minimal from the standards of today's college graduates and Ph.D.'s, but he had a deep interest in questions of science and questions of the univ...
I wasn't aware of my dad being an actor when I was young. I remember there was an Australian children's entertainer on television called Ralph Harris and when I'd say my father was an actor, kids would say, you know, 'oh, is he Ralph Harris?' And I h...
I'm trying to create a collection of stories - the 'U.F.O.W.A.V.E.' songs are all stories. I haven't really taken direct lyrical influence from other songwriters, but my dad bought me a book of W.H. Auden's poems when I was younger, and the imagery r...
I got my interest in Lotte Lenya and the Brecht-Weill canon from my parents. And I love classical music - I got that from my parents. I love Cole Porter - that I got from my dad.
The big things in the average person's life are the romances that they have - and then the destruction and loss of them. Parents, siblings, children, the death of parents, family tension... these are monumental things. They struck me as being interes...
In the year since we brought things into the open with a clean breath of fresh air at City Hall, we have learned about corrupt spending practices and unethical conflicts of interest that waste your money... and keep Dallas from being the great city o...
It was something I was more interested in myself. When I went to see my sister dance at ballet, I was really into costumes and the arts, and my family was also supportive of whatever me and my sister wanted to do. I would say I pushed myself the most...
Gaming in general is a male thing. It isn't that gaming is designed to exclude women. Everybody who's tried to design a game to interest a large female audience has failed. And I think that has to do with the different thinking processes of men and w...
Embedded in 'The New York Times' institutional perspective and reporting methodologies are all sorts of quite debatable and subjective political and cultural assumptions about the world. And with some noble exceptions, 'The Times,' by design or other...
I was a weird teenager. My mother was actually worried because I didn't have any interest in dating in my teenage years. I had all this desire to pursue my passions like ballet, then sailing, then music, so I didn't have any emptiness to fill.
If I talk to a woman for more than five minutes I can tell you exactly whether she's an Aidan girl or a Mr. Big girl. Aidan girls are more interested in nurturing relationships and building a nest while Mr. Big girls are more about show and having fu...
No state of society or laws can render men so much alike but that education, fortune, and tastes will interpose some differences between them; and though different men may sometimes find it their interest to combine for the same purposes, they will n...
There are no tests similar to SATs to tell us how much undergraduates know. State legislators, who appropriate billions of dollars each year to higher education, are naturally interested in finding out what they are getting for their money.
