Nothing could be more dangerous than following the popular maxim whereby it is the spirit of the law that must be consulted. This is an embankment that, once broken, gives way to a torrent of opinions.
My dad was an autoworker, my mom was a clerk. Until I was thirty-five, I never made more than fifteen thousand dollars a year.
The theatre training is second to none in Ireland and England. You meet people who haven't had theatre training - it is harder for people who worked in TV to go into theatre than the other way around.
I believe that the ability to talk to people and have them feeling engaged rather than patronised isn't something you can learn. It's a bit like being able to sing or play cricket. You can either do it, or you can't.
One of my key realizations about happiness, and a point oddly under-emphasized by positive psychologists, given its emphasis in popular culture, is that outer order contributes to inner calm. More than it should.
Kid's culture is often dismissed as superficial, like high fibre McDonald's, but it's so much more important than that.
There is nothing more painful than watching a child with a terminal disease.
I'm a pathetic haggler and often give more than the original price out of a misplaced sense of duty.
I had begun reading earlier than most because my sister Emmy Lou, no doubt to keep me from bothering her, decided it was easier to teach me to read stories to myself rather than to read them to me, as she had been doing.
My life is full of way more mistakes than successes.
I love the journeys of research and discovery their development takes me on. I see prints as less 'decorative' than many might, and more fundamental to a garment's core.
One thing that was amazing about World War II was that everybody signed up for the duration plus six months. Fliers got to leave combat after 25 missions, or 35 missions, but other than that, you were in it. You were part of the great effort, until, oh boy, six months after it was over.
It's not a coincidence that in the Scriptures, poverty is mentioned more than 2,100 times. It's not an accident. That's a lot of air time, 2,100 mentions.
There's a lot of films that have relatively rigid road maps because they have a script and others that are less rigid because they have less of a script, like 'Elephant.' The road map becomes more interpretive, maybe, than one with a detailed script. Editing-wise, they all have their problems.
Sometimes I write less than I'd like but do research. Other times, editor's notes or a copy-edited manuscript or page proofs for a forthcoming novel mean that I need to put my attentions elsewhere for a day or two, but I always come back to writing.
There is not less wit nor less invention in applying rightly a thought one finds in a book, than in being the first author of that thought.
I just played at a club in L.A. called the Baked Potato. It fits like 90 people. It's like playing somewhere in a basement in, like, Indiana or somewhere where all your friends show up. It's really fun and there's a very different energy to that than to play to 50,000 at a Tokyo baseball stadium.
I've always slightly preferred Spade to Marlowe, probably just because I thought Hammett was cooler than Chandler. He was leftwing, his name shortened to Dash rather than Ray, and he didn't smoke a pipe or like cats.
Nothing thrills me more than to be good at something. It's very rewarding, and I feel grateful and blessed, and I never take it for granted.
We have to make a bridge of confidence based on natural and elementary morality which corresponds to the natures of man and which would be respected by all men. I may be naive in this, but I think it is better to be naive than skeptical.
There is more to life than show business.
Resilience is accepting your new reality, even if it's less good than the one you had before.
When I look back at football, I've always said to myself, 'I'd rather leave the game and have something in my tank rather than have left all of me out on the field.'
A woman never forgets her sex. She would rather talk with a man than an angel, any day.
I grew up in such a melting pot. There's more ethnicities in Queens than there is in any place on the planet. So you grow up knowing things about other cultures.
Moderating a debate means spending more time with briefing books than with your children. It means writing and rewriting and rephrasing. It means finding a way to be alert enough to notice when your question goes unanswered and nimble enough to decide what you will do about that on the spot.
I look at the way that my kids interact with technology, and it becomes a mirror to the ways in which I myself interact with technology. I can see the ways in which that addiction and compulsion starts to settle in on them, and it's much more unnerving to see it in them than it is to experience it myself.
I'm probably a guy's girl, although I hate that phrase. I tend to have more close male friends than I do female friends, and I always have. I would say that of my 10 close friends, seven are men.
There would be more sense in insisting on man's limitations because he cannot be a mother than on a woman's because she can be.
I can't imagine doing anything cooler or better than what we did on 'The Stage' and felt like we're firing on all cylinders.
Having grown up on 'Star Trek,' I've had one great dream since childhood, and that is to see my life end somewhere other than here on Earth.
There are times when hard fouls are just a part of the game, and then there's times when they're a little bit further than that.
I do not believe that the top rate should be lowered for individuals who are making more than $1 million a year. I don't think there's any need to eliminate the estate tax.
Indians walk softly and hurt the landscape hardly more than the birds and squirrels, and their brush and bark huts last hardly longer than those of wood rats, while their more enduring monuments, excepting those wrought on the forests by the fires they made to improve their hunting grounds, vanish in a few centuries.
Certainly what happened to the dinosaurs was not good - that was a terrible day for the dinosaurs, very sad. But I have to say, there are a lot of threats we face as people and, as someone who lives in Los Angeles, I'm personally more likely to die from driving on the freeway than I am from an asteroid, so you have to put that risk in perspective.
I think my cruelty hides beneath the surface a lot more than Sue Sylvester's.
