In 1982, when I was almost 26 years old, I decided I wanted to write fiction. I'd majored in journalism in college, and I'd always assumed I would write nonfiction.
One would be forgiven for concluding that the assumed benefits of financial innovation are not all they were cracked up to be.
We all know that looks matter, and modern politicians have always assumed that their battles are decided on both substance and image.
Audiences make their minds up about people they see on screen, just like they do in real life. That's what fascinates me in film. You see a character and have to think: is this person different to what I assumed he was when I first saw him?
I assumed 'Freak the Mighty' was probably too weird and melodramatic to find a publisher. I certainly never expected the book to have a profound influence on my career as a writer, but indeed it has.
In my lifetime, as a younger man, you were assumed to be an honest person. Your word was your bond, and a handshake was as good as a contract in business.
I think we're realizing that gay people are able to do the type of comedy that we just assumed was for straight people over the years. Whatever old boundaries there were, which were very real and still have an effect on us, in the way we socialize, I think that's slowly becoming less important.
When I was asked to write an article about what it was like to work with my husband on a TV show, I assumed it was because people thought it would be titillating. He's a creator/writer/producer, I'm an actress; there must be lots of gossip, in-fighting, maybe some crazy-sexy time on the set, right? Actually, it's pretty tame.
If I was discovered by anyone, it would be Stephen O'Neil, who saw me in a play at Williamstown and introduced me to my team who I'm still with today. He was the first person to introduce me to the film and TV world. Other than that, I just assumed I would be a theater actor my whole life.
I've had this terrible stomach problem for years, and that has made touring difficult. People would see me sitting in the corner by myself looking sick and gloomy. The reason is that I was trying to fight against the stomach pain, trying to hold my food down. People looked me and assumed I was some kind of addict.
I always assumed scientists were free to ask any question, pursue any line of inquiry without fear or reprisal.
I never was a liner note junkie. I didn't know who produced records or there was such a thing as a straight songwriter. I always assumed that everybody that was singing a song wrote it or made it up.
I think it's safe to say that 'manliness' was a common theme in my upbringing. It was an assumed status, but - and here's the important bit - it was the Rudyard Kipling kind. The emphasis was on gentlemanly conduct, sportsmanship, fairness and stoicism.
I had assumed that Bush's seemingly inflexible policy to support Sharon was for political reasons of his getting elected. But as to whether he really believes his actions are going to hasten the day of the final conflict, I do not know.
People assumed that I wasn't open to doing TV, probably because I was doing a film and reality shows. I have become choosy and want to take up substantial roles.
My parents weren't around much, but I assumed everybody's family was the same. I didn't know people had mummies and daddies who would give them milk and cookies after school. I just thought everybody lived on Central Park West and they had a nanny to take care of them.
Unix has, I think for many years, had a reputation as being difficult to learn and incomplete. Difficult to learn means that the set of shared conventions, and things that are assumed about the way it works, and the basic mechanisms, are just different from what they are in other systems.
Using static scoring, tax cuts are broadly assumed to 'cost' a raw amount of reduced revenue. With dynamic scoring, the new revenue likely to flow from increased economic activity produced by a tax cut is considered, improving the accuracy of the projection.
In every union roles are assumed, some traditional, some not. My husband used to pay his own bills, I used to call my own repairman. But as marriages progress, you surrender areas of your own competence, often without even knowing it.
I grew up in the middle of dairy country in Wisconsin, about as far from any major metropolitan area as you can get. I always assumed I was going to be an actor. I don't know why. I didn't have any reason to think that. In fact, when I finally did try it, when I was in college, I was really bad at it and didn't enjoy it.
One of the things that impacted me the most was in the 12th grade. I just assumed I would get the lead in the musical. Well, I didn't get it; I got the second lead, and I was devastated... my mom said something like, 'Often the supporting character is better.'
What then is tragedy? In the Elizabethan period it was assumed that a play ending in death was a tragedy, but in recent years we have come to understand that to live on is sometimes far more tragic than death.
For nearly 2,000 years, most people assumed that the only sources of tradition about Jesus and his disciples were the four gospels in the New Testament.
The education I received was a British education, in which British ideas, British culture, British institutions, were automatically assumed to be superior. There was no such thing as African culture.
9/11 was a hugely overblown event that only assumed its overarching importance a) because it was done to the United States and b) because of the way the U.S. reacted.
To my astonishment, everything that I had assumed was now questioned by the findings. What started off as a search for identity that appeared to be purely Scottish in origin ended up as a discovery of my migrant roots - indeed an understanding that almost all of our families, at some stage, have been migrants - and my European roots.
America is remarkable, don't you think so? When I came to Washington, I was twelve years old. I spoke English with an English accent. It was assumed that it would go on in that way.
After being raised as an evangelical Christian, I for years assumed that Christianity was the default - there were Christians, and then there were weirdos. I was shocked when, in college, I found that some people get offended when you tell them, for instance, that their recovery from surgery was a 'miracle.'
Hypotheses should be subservient only in explaining the properties of things but not assumed in determining them, unless so far as they may furnish experiments.
I have played Polynesian. I have played an Arabian girl. I played an East Indian girl. And what was so confusing about that, which I mention in my book, is that I assumed I had to have an accent. Nobody said anything, so I made up what I call the universal ethnic accent, and they all sounded alike. It didn't matter who I was playing.
It's often assumed that British actors read Shakespeare and sonnets as we're going to bed at night and we're all very familiar with it.
My father was a research scientist in tropical medicine, so I always assumed I would be a scientist, too. I felt that medicine was too vague and inexact, so I chose physics.
I always assumed that like my mother before me, one day I would have children.
I assumed that 'Gone Girl' would do incrementally better than 'Dark Places,' and that would be great. So the fact that it did more than that was kind of an incredibly pleasant surprise.
When I wrote 'Neuromancer', I had a list in my head of all the things the future was assumed to be which it would not be in the book I was about to write. In a sense, I intended 'Neuromancer', among other things, to be a critique of all the aspects of science fiction that no longer satisfied me.
I get a lot of people that say, 'You know what, I heard that you're a painter, and I thought, 'Oh, another model who is saying she's an artist.' They assumed it was going to be a few splashes on a canvas.