A job letter, an interview - even a writing sample - have far less to do with intellect and far more to do with aesthetics than you think.
I think escapism is very important, certainly in my life. I love nothing more than escaping into the world of a film or a novel. To be involved in creating that for other people is a privilege.
There is nothing which can better deserve your patronage, than the promotion of science and literature. Knowledge is in every country the surest basis of public happiness.
By and large, talent is in such short supply that mediocrity can be taken for brilliance rather more than genius can go undiscovered.
There's been almost a dozen films that have been made against me. There's actually more films made attacking me than films I've made.
I truly never saw myself doing anything other than music. There was nothing else that brought me this much joy, but also this much frustration.
We were looking at ourselves as a store rather than a brand. When you do that, you draw thick, heavy lines around your freedom.
I am the largest market shareholder of clothing in the U.K. and I am not a destination shop for food. If the clothing market is affected - and it has been - and I hold my market share mathematically, then fine, I am doing no worse than the market is doing, which is exactly the case, but I'm losing revenue.
That's the way this business works: if your movies do well at the box office, you will be offered more movies. It doesn't matter if you're a nice guy or you're a prick. If your movies do well, there's a job waiting for you in Hollywood. It's not any more complicated than that.
Girls have a tendency to take responsibility for romantic misinterpretations, when often it's men whose perfectly honed emotional inscrutability makes life more complicated than it should be.
When I was a graduate student at the Iowa Writers' Workshop for fiction writing, I felt both coveted and hated. My white classmates never failed to remind me that I was more fortunate than they were at this particular juncture in American literature.
'War and Peace' goes down a lot smoother than a Dan Brown novel, let me tell you.
I think there's only eight songs on 'Born to Run' - I don't think it's much more than 35 minutes long. But as you move into it, where every song comes up in the sequence makes a lot of sense - though we weren't thinking about it; we were going on instinct at the time.
I've heard people, usually writers, say that no one wrote a great book after winning the Booker, but I honestly did not feel any big pressure. 'The Gathering' did hang over me in that it was darker than I thought at the time.
An Olympic medal is much better than a world record, and so is a world championship or Commonwealth Games medal.
I think we need people with stronger ideals than John Kerry or Bill Clinton. I think we need people with more courage and vision.
He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lamp posts - for support rather than for illumination.
I've probably done more than a thousand interviews, and I can't remember what people asked me two months ago or two days ago.
I care about our employees more than anybody in my company. I care about my kids, too, but that doesn't mean I give them everything that they want.
I've spent more time on Hillary Clinton's Flickr page than any other human being on the planet.
I have always said that, more than 'big bang' reforms, it is every day what is happening, changing on the ground.
The Russians are very much more up and down than the French.
I think the tennis is only a game. You can lose. You can win. After that? In life, there are much more important things than tennis.
No I don't think it was a myth at all, anymore than what the recession that the whole country was experiencing was a myth, which obviously seems like it's going to get worse and worse.
I've never been willing to commit to more than one at a time, because I just don't know - I don't plan the books out ahead of time. So I have no idea how much ground we'll cover.
It's probably an intellectual weakness, but I look at the stars, and I say, 'There's something bigger than us out there.'
There's nothing more important than the health of our babies.
I think a lot of people have a problem with the fact that I've adopted an African child, a child who has a different color skin than I do.
From the law firm's perspective, billing by the hour has a certain appeal: it shifts risk from the firm to the client in case the work takes longer than expected. But from a client's perspective, it doesn't work so well. It gives lawyers an incentive to overstaff and to overresearch cases.
The reality is, I've started multiple companies, so actually I'm probably more of a product/creative person than I am sales. Although I can do both.
An act of unilateral nuclear disarmament by a European power would have a much more lasting impact than all the sanctions under consideration. Sanctions, as we know from the example of Iraq, always affect the least powerful citizens the most.
Surfing for me is more than my lifestyle; it's my passion, my love, and it's a part of me.
I wouldn't want to do a Bollywood film per se, but I would like to do an Indian-language film. For some reason I think Bollywood has become synonymous with commercial cinema, which is song and dance and everything that is larger than life, and I am interested in the reality.
We've always described our sound as a bit more guitar driven than normal pop music. Kind of Pink in a boy band form. We've heard a few people say that so now we use it. I think Pink is amazing person to be compared to.
Si's beard is really awkward. One side is longer than the other, and it's about three different colors. I don't think he washes it. It's nasty.
Do not consider that to be wealth which is hoarded away, for how is it better than sand gathered from the nearest heap? Nor that which comes in from men who groan at their taxes: for the gold that is wrung from tears is of base alloy and black.
