As a young boy, I read 'Cheaper by the Dozen' and immediately became neurotic about my use of time. It taxed me severely, but only for the next 50 years. But I think it also allowed me to discipline myself to sit in the chair and be a writer, where o...
I think because my parents died in their early 50s, mid 50s, I always thought I would die young. And that's been both a useful thing and I suspect something that's haunted me a little bit.
The massive prison construction represents a commitment by our nation to plan for social failure by spending billions of dollars to lock up hundreds of thousands of people while at the same time cutting billions of dollars from programs that would pr...
We speak in hushed voices, so as not to wake our memories, the things we've done, the things we'll continue to do, for fear of breaking the cycle, how fierce we were when we were young, when we were unafraid of coming unhinged.
Since I was young, I have always known this: Life damages us, every one. We can’t escape that damage. But now, I am also learning this: We can be mended. We mend each other
I could hardly wait for following chapters, which arrived in dribs and drabs, and I began to feel for all the world like the young T.B. Macaulay walking from London to meet the Cambridge coach bearing the next installment of Waverley novels.
I don't play polo anymore because I am too old. But we still have a half a dozen horses - a couple of young horses we are teaching how to play polo and older horses that are real trustworthy when you get them up in the mountains.
Part of my motivation for writing mysteries for young people is that I loved mysteries when I was growing up, and now that I'm on the creative end of things, I'm discovering that they're even more fun to write!
Back when I was growing up, it was like, 'You're too young to know what you want. We're telling you what you want. It doesn't matter if you like it. And you are stupid. Just so you know.'
I'm one of those actors who's going to have to create a space for themselves. It's very easy to be the young Tom Cruise, because Hollywood knows what to do with you. But if you're someone who's bringing someone slightly left of center to the table, y...
There is something mysteriously powerful that can happen when young, inchoate minds come into contact with older and more worldly ones in a spirit of intellectual and creative endeavour - if I believed in progress, I suppose that's what I'd call it.
Go to the young conductors who are not making it, and you will hear how we shouldn't push ourselves or sell ourselves, how they don't have the right connections and the right opportunities. Well, you can be sure they've had the opportunities.
Nabokov, who I loved more than any other writer when I was young, had such contempt for dialogue. When I was younger, I never wrote a word of dialogue because of him. I thought it was a childish part of a novel.
I enjoy acting now more than I ever have. I've had lots of difficult times when I was younger, but that was all tied up with thwarted ambition. It's hard being a young actor, because you don't realise until later that it's only ever about doing the w...
Some months ago, while I was preparing a new work, I told a young cinema executive my intention of including in a soundtrack two themes from Bach. But when he asked me which has been the last hit from that Bach?, then I knew that I had no longer plac...
Video games seem to be mostly a boy thing - viewed by young boys and created by big boys. I believe that if more videos games were created by women, the violence in these games - especially against women - would be rapidly toned down.
If anything, we older people yearn for a peaceful world even more than young people do. We are the ones who lost friends or relatives in some war. We are the ones who have lived a lifetime of seeing and reading about human suffering.
It’s Curt Schilling and his bloody sock staring down the Yankees in the Bronx. It’s Derek Lowe taking the mound the very next night to complete the most improbable comeback in baseball history—and then seven days later clinching the World Serie...
It always has been and always will be the same. The old folk of our grandfathers' young days sang a song bearing exactly the same burden; and the young folk of to-day will drone out precisely similar nonsense for the aggravation of the next generatio...
While Elstir, at my request, went on painting, I wandered about in the half-light, stopping to examine first one picture, then another. Most of those that covered the walls were not what I should chiefly have liked to see of his work, paintings in wh...
For, like desire, regret seeks not to be analysed but to be satisfied. When one begins to love, one spends one’s time, not in getting to know what one’s love really is, but in making it possible to meet next day. When one abandons love one seeks ...