Our generation in the west was lucky: we had readymade gateways. We had books, paper, teachers, schools and libraries. But many in the world lack these luxuries. How do you practice without such tryout venues?
Our original name was Wild Country, but when we first went to The Bowery, they had the name of all 50 states around the edge of the club, so we went to the sign that said 'Alabama' and stuck our band name underneath it.
I was a wild kid. I was left to climb trees. And you know those railways logs, they piled them up, six feet apart, and I'd jump from one to the other. Without a safety net! I was an incredible tomboy.
We must take positions. Our weakness in the West is born of the fact of so-called 'objectivity.' Objectivity does not exist - it cannot exist!... The word is a hypocrisy which is sustained by the lie that the truth stays in the middle. No, sir: Somet...
For all their current prestige, Osama bin Laden and the suicide bombers are still regarded in all but the most desperate districts of Gaza or Peshawar as romantics with little chance of more than symbolic victories, however bloody and brutal. That gi...
Joe Louis was one of my closest friends.... I'm a great boxing fan. I used to go to the American Legion Stadium in Hollywood, every Friday night for 15 years. Down the aisle would come Lupe Velez, Johnny Weismuller, Mae West. All at ringside.
I have a rebellious teenage thing. If my mom says I can't do it, I'm gonna do it. But I'm pretty good. That's why it was fun to play Sam in 'The Bling Ring.' I got to be someone crazy and wild to the extreme, then go home and relax and get rid of the...
When I began 'Wicked', I really thought of it entirely as a one-off, as the English say. There was no intention that there should ever be a follow up, because the subtitle was 'The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West'. She was dead and gon...
I was 21 in 1968, so I'm as much a child of the '60s as is possible to be. In those years the subject of religion had really almost disappeared; the idea that religion was going to be a major force in the life of our societies, in the West anyway, wo...
Ever since the destruction of Baghdad by the Mongols in 1258, the Muslim world has been in slow decline relative to the west. With Napoleon's invasion of Egypt and the creeping British annexation of Muslim India, that decline took on a malign aspect.
My father served as an Army doctor in West Germany in the late '50s and early '60s. As a result, he and my mother - both native southerners - were acutely aware of what had happened during the Holocaust.
The 1960s was a period when writers in the West began to be aware of the extraordinary eloquence and popular attraction of the Russian poets such as Yevtushenko and Voznesensky - oppositional figures who could draw crowds. The Russian poets recited f...
Christopher McCandless: It should not be denied that being footloose has always exhilarated us. It is associated in our minds with escape from history and oppression and law and irksome obligations. Absolute freedom. And the road has always led west.
Howl: Calcifer, move the castle sixty miles west. [walks away] Howl: And while you're at it, make hot water for my bath. Calcifer: Fine, like moving the castle isn't hard enough!
9/11 was a deliberate, carefully planned evil act of the long-waged war on the West by Koran-inspired soldiers of Allah around the world. They hated us before George W. Bush was in office. They hated us before Israel existed. And the avengers of the ...
The first book I wrote was The Bride Price which was a romantic book, but my husband burnt the book when he saw it. I was the typical African woman, I'd done this privately, I wanted him to look at it, approve it and he said he wouldn't read it.
Whether labeled as such or not, I think every book I've ever written has been, more or less, a romantic suspense. I have always put tremendous effort into making each book a page turner: The harder it is for the reader to put it down, the better I've...
I went through a stage of writing my cramped hand in tiny books. My two sisters and I did have our Bronte period. My mum is from Yorkshire, and we would go up to the Moors. It tapped into our romantic visions of ourselves.
Foreign audiences are used to seeing Mexico in other sorts of movies. 'Casi divas' is a step toward a more commercially successful cinema, without the violence, blood and exaggerations. The movie reflects a more human Mexico, while remaining a chick ...
I think the Internet is an awful lot like FM radio was when it broke out in the late '60s. It's kind of a wild and wily kind of format. They could play 20 songs in a row that had the word 'blue' in them, or whatever they wanted to do.
I came to Harlem from West Virginia when I was three, after my mother died. My father, who was very poor, gave me up to two wonderful people, my foster parents.
