Even as a kid, I was a businessman. I figured out that if you plucked all the berries off my neighbor's tree and smashed them up, they made a Nickelodeon Gak-type consistency. I sold them to all the neighborhood kids and made stacks of quarters. Of c...
The one I remember is going into London, as it was for us in Essex, on New Year's Eve in 1981. There were four of us and we'd had a few lagers on the way. One of my mates threw up in the Tube and then stood up and fell over in it. We thought it was t...
When I was growing up, my mother would always say, 'It will go on your permanent record.' There was no 'permanent record.' If there were a 'permanent record,' I'd never be able to be a lawyer. I was such a bum in elementary school and high school... ...
In the moment before I crossed over, I knew that the priests and magicians of Egypt were fools and charlatans for promising to prolong the beauties of life beyond the world we are give. Death is no enemy, but the foundation of gratitude, sympathy, an...
What’s left of what your body was —once the girl with bare shoulder blades , giggling, once the girl galloping an imaginary horse, once the girl sleeping in her sequined red dress— was now ash in a jar. Grains of bone. But then, I knew it wasn�...
We decided to play the NEC because we were asked to, and because we actually rather like the place: we've always enjoyed doing it before. We don't often get sensible offers to play in the UK, so most years we just play on the mainland, with the occas...
The state exists for man,not man for the state.The same may be said ofscience. These are old phrases,coined by people who saw in human individuality the highest human value .I would hesitate to repeat them,were it not for the ever recurring danger th...
I believe that Gandhi’s views were the most enlightened of all the political men in our time. We should strive to do things in his spirit: not to use violence in fighting for our cause, but by non-participation in anything you believe is evil.
How noble and good everyone could be if, every evening before falling asleep, they were to recall to their minds the events of the whole day and consider exactly what has been good and bad. Then without realizing it, you try to improve yourself at th...
In 'Finding Nemo,' all of the voices were recorded separate - so I would be in a sound booth in a studio by myself reading the lines with just the director. Basically, you can just come in, and it doesn't matter what you are wearing or what you look ...
When we were working on 'Taxi to the Dark Side,' we would purposefully not show it to certain people in the cutting room, because we would include a lot of horrible material and would need a fresh pespective. They would look at us and say, 'Are you o...
When I first started painting, I had an interesting nightmare about Cleveland - I dreamed the houses there were encased in this free-floating cage structure. I guess Cleveland was a confining place for me, even though my parents weren't too conservat...
Many years ago it was taught that plants and animals were composed of different materials: plants, of a chemical substance of three elements,- carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen; animals of one of four elements, nitrogen being added to the other three.
We didn't do anything wrong, but among the lessons learned, given the magnitude of the problems we now face in Afghanistan, a major U.S. force on the ground would convince the world we were in for the long-haul recovery of a country devastated by 21 ...
It was impossible for me to believe that conditions in Europe could be worse than they were in the Polish section of Chicago, and in many Italian and Irish tenements, or that any workshops could be worse than some of those I had seen in our foreign q...
For such is the depth of the Christian Scriptures that, even if I were attempting to study them and nothing else, from boyhood to decrepit old age, with the utmost leisure, the most unwearied zeal, and with talents greater than I possess, I would sti...
The physique of a Messiah. But too clever to believe in God or be convinced of his own mission. And too sensitive, even if he were convinced, to carry it out. His muscles would like to act and his feelings would like to believe; but his nerve-endings...
I was tired and I had overworked myself and burnt myself out. So I went to Egypt by myself. When I saw what was built there, it made me understand how powerful we are, that we can create anything. And I felt like I needed to create things that were t...
I have to be careful, as I don't want to offend Midlanders, but growing up, it wasn't like growing up in London. Anything you were interested in, you'd be able to find someone also interested in it. In the Midlands, nobody came out as gay at my schoo...
Shaquille and I kind of joke we were the Christopher Columbus of social media. We're kind of out on a boat by ourselves going through these uncharted waters. But it's become more understood, embraced and accepted, and now it's pretty much expected by...
People know me by the way I live my life, not by the labels I wear, and that means we can hold all sorts of conversations and learn from each other in a way that would not happen if there were the walls of ignorant prejudice between us. --Oisce
