When we heard that little dial-up sound, that eeeeee, and then you connected, and you then go and you check your mail and you get that 'you got mail,' you were excited. I mean, that was the thing.
Apparently I'm well-known for my stories, my raconteur tales, that sort of thing.
With the DVR, I was mostly writing about it as a good thing in giving us the choice of when and how to watch things. But there's what we lose in the bargain, which is the collective spectacle. 'Did you see Jay Leno last night?'
I'd done kids' TV in the U.K., but not great kids' TV. So yes, 'Submarine' was the first film and the first good thing that I have done.
It's a very terrible thing to be Maria Callas, because it's a question of trying to understand something you can never really understand.
I am a person beset with fears, and one of my fears is that this thing that I will be writing for five years won't work. And the likelihood, of course, is that it won't - and that's fine.
The great thing about having money is that you can actually just get on with your life and not have to think about paying the bills or crouch over 'The Wall Street Journal' or the 'Financial Times' and look at the stock figures and things like that. That bores me rigid.
When you do what I do, there are a lot of institutions that give you awards. I've gotten maybe 20 medals. They're glorious, and there's a spirit behind them. But sometimes they give you this dreadful modern glass thing. I wish everyone could afford a loving cup.
This is the devilish thing about foreign affairs: they are foreign and will not always conform to our whim.
That Shaw is the most egotistical thing! He hogged the camera and spent more time with the hairdresser and the makeup man than any actor on the lot!
The weird thing is, I'm very private.
You only live once. Trying to do the right thing for other people often doesn't work out, and you have to follow your own path in order to make things work out best for everyone.
Sometimes in TV, it can get really stale, especially if you're doing these 23-episode years. It's a lot of work, and to put your family through that, on a location, is not always the greatest thing in the world.
I started performing music about the age of 16. I lived in Brooklyn, New York, and this thing called the Flatbush Fair comes once a year. That was my first time on stage.
You may think it was a very little thing, and in these days it seems to me like a trifle, but it was a most important incident in my life. I could scarcely credit that I, the poor boy, had earned a dollar in less than a day; that by honest work, I had earned a dollar. I was a more hopeful and thoughtful boy from that time.
One thing that writers have in common is that they are readers first. They have read lots and lots of stuff, because they're just infested with lots of stuff.
Because I was traveling a lot during the '70s, the only thing I could do on the road was take photographs, so there wasn't much painting during those years.
There's no such thing as a perfect person, so it makes no sense to write a perfect person. I don't know any author who'd try. And we write characters, not representations of groups.
It's absolutely of no importance who or what V was under the mask. He isn't a who or a what, he's an idea. The thing is, you couldn't continue it. Now and then the idea of a sequel has been raised, in vague forms, but I think it would be a bad idea. The story's finished.
The only thing I can say that is wonderful about my mother is she forced me to learn three verses of the Bible every day of my life, and I've read the Bible now five times and it taught me the English language.
The average person in Hollywood just assumes that if you're on a hit TV show, then that's the first thing you've ever done.
I have always thought - and a lot of people won't agree with this - that we're incredibly driven by fear, basically. Aren't we? It's awful to be frightened. I think it's a very strong, very powerful thing, fear.
I knew that 'Next Thing' was an angry album while I was making it. But I thought that it was angry the way that you get in a fight, not angry as a huge life change.
The great thing about working in cable is that, since the season is truncated - we only do 12 shows - the writers are more at ease in terms of mapping out the trajectory of the story and the characters.
My dad actually taught me how to play piano. I was classically trained, but I've started to branch off a little bit into blues and jazz. That's my new thing.
I do like the zombie movies quite a bit. I know there are purist zombie guys that don't like the running zombies, but I dig the infected thing. I think that's a scarier incorporation of an element into the genre.
With 'Pariah,' at the time, I had just come out. I had a coming out experience, and I was writing about it, transposing my experience as an adult: What would it have been like if I had been a teenager in Brooklyn? The funny thing was people thought I was from Brooklyn. I had to be like, 'No, I'm from Nashville.'
I remember sitting on the back of the bus on the first day of the Social Experiment tour with my face in my hands. I emptied out my bank account, and before I did that tour, that was the number one thing I said I'd never do. I'll never empty out my savings.
I don't want my children to have to wade through the crap to get to the cream, you know. I want them to be aware that I struggled to live with and tell my truth, and that it was a decent thing.
The most valuable thing to me seems to be time, and with time, I can be great. I have been... and I will be.
I've discovered the burger is a crazy thing in Vegas, but I was one of the early chefs to do a lot of burgers.
I did 'Malice,' 'Sommersby,' and 'Sleepless in Seattle,' and they're as disparate characters as I've ever played. But somehow, there was that thing - they were all second male leads, so they all didn't get the girl in some weird way.
Well, the most important thing about Islam is that we have to differentiate between two kinds of Islam. The first one is the institution of Islam... second, the culture of Islam.
If I had to put a name to it, I would wish that all my books were entertainments. I think the first thing you've got to do is grab the reader by the ear, and make him sit down and listen. Make him laugh, make him feel. We all want to be entertained at a very high level.
As adults, when we attend to something in the world we are vividly conscious of that particular thing, and we shut out the surrounding world. The classic metaphor is that attention is like a spotlight, illuminating one part of the world and leaving the rest in darkness.
Many of my students assume that government protection is the only thing ensuring decent wages for most American workers. But basic economics shows that competition between employers for workers can be very effective at preventing businesses from misbehaving.
