I love the little garden in the back of my family's brownstone in Brooklyn. Digging out there in the dirt is a joy for me, although by the time August rolls around and my roses have black spot, I need the break winter provides.
When you're a kid, and someone is your best friend, you almost don't need words. It's almost like puppies in a - frolicking in a garden or something. You don't articulate stuff. You just live it.
While novels are fiction, mine are usually very close to my heart. Like my other books, 'The Lemon Orchard' is inspired by something I care about. I care so deeply. The stories are my dreams, and I want to do a lot of research. Roberto is based on a real live friend of mine named Armando who worked in my garden.
My husband will tell you one of the most frequent questions he gets from world leaders is, 'How's your wife's garden?'
I grew up in Chillum Heights in the Washington, D.C. area., and it was never a garden spot. When guys go, 'Hey, when I grew up, my neighborhood was tough, and it was this and that'... the reality is that it was just a terribly sad place. And thank God, I was able to escape it.
You get moments all the time that kind of make you pinch yourself, some of them make you quite emotional. Winning a BRIT was a big moment because we were just so excited to be at the awards in the first place. Selling out Madison Square Garden was pretty amazing too. Then we woke to the news that our UK tour was sold out. It was crazy.
My parents, Mary Agnes Smith and Rowland Smith, both had to work since their early teens, she in the holiday boarding house of her mother and he in his father's market garden in Marton Moss, a village on the south side of Blackpool, just north of Saint Anne's-on-Sea.
The best ideas are those that really affect me emotionally - those are the ones you never forget. You think to yourself, 'I want to write that book', for years; those are the ideas that I love to work with, and 'The Bone Garden' was one of them.
I worked with Congress on legislation, gave speeches to CEOs, military generals and Hollywood executives. But I also worked to ensure that my efforts would resonate with kids and families - and that meant doing things in a creative and unconventional way. So, yeah, I planted a garden and hula-hooped on the White House lawn with kids.
There is nothing I like better at the end of a hot summer's day than taking a short walk around the garden. You can smell the heat coming up from the earth to meet the cooler night air.
There is no reason why the Louvre should be your favourite gallery just because it has the grandest collections in France, any more than Kew should necessarily be a favourite garden because it has the largest assemblage of plants, or Tesco your chosen shop because it has the widest variety of canned beans.
I want to still be able to garden while I can bend over.
Part of the delight of my garden is that you just get lost in it before you've even started to do anything.
When I went to bed as a child, I was told, 'You don't know where you'll wake up.' When I ran in the garden, I was told that running was bad for the heart. Everything had its sinister aspect - milk shrinks the stomach, lemon thins the blood.
I don't paint butter dishes, doilies, or hummingbirds in my garden. It's more raw, I suppose. But it always creates a reaction.
Not many people know this, but when Yes first started doing club dates back in 1968, '69, we did a few tracks from 'The Magic Garden' album in our set. We just loved the harmonies that the 5th Dimension had as well.
I always remember my childhood house with happy memories. There was a beautiful garden, and outside my bedroom window was a jasmine vine which would open in the evenings, giving off a divine scent.
My passion for gardening may strike some as selfish, or merely an act of resignation in the face of overwhelming problems that beset the world. It is neither. I have found that each garden is just what Voltaire proposed in Candide: a microcosm of a just and beautiful society.
Initially, when I first became a Christian and got into ministry, my thought was that God existed to make my life better and to take me to Heaven. Now I realize that it is not about me at all. It is all about God and that He did this to display His plan to restore the Earth to the Garden of Eden state.
The Garden Bridge has not found its right moment, but I hope one day it will and that London continues to be open to ideas that make life here better.
I think New Orleans is such a beautiful city. It looks like a fairytale when you walk through the French Quarter or the Garden District. There is such a lush sense of color, style, architecture - and the people themselves.
I am very happy in second-hand bookshops; would a gardener not be happy in a garden?
Granny beads are what they're called when a grandma works the garden all day - you always see them - they have a handkerchief around their neck with a lot of dust on them, and then the sweat will go down and make these black beads of sweat and dirt around their neck. And that's what they call granny beads.
I have no problem with the financial industry inviting the Trojan Horse of blockchain technology into their walled garden. Because I know how powerful the technology is.
I fell in love with stories watching a British television puppet show called 'Thunderbirds' when it first came out on TV, about 1965, so I would have been 4 or 5 years old. I went out into the garden at my mom and dad's house, and I used to play with my little dinky toys, little cars and trucks and things.
I was honoured when they asked me to appear at the president's birthday rally in Madison Square Garden. There was like a hush over the whole place when I came on to sing 'Happy Birthday,' like if I had been wearing a slip, I would have thought it was showing or something. I thought, 'Oh, my gosh, what if no sound comes out!'
'Safe Harbor' is a state of mind... it's the place - in reality or metaphor - to which one goes in times of trouble or worry. It can be a friendship, marriage, church, garden, beach, poem, prayer, or song.
My grandmother was this amazing woman in the Dominican Republic who used to read tea leaves and palms. She would cure people in her neighborhood by going into her garden, plucking a couple of leaves, and brewing teas.
On the subject of literary genres, I've always felt that my response to poetry is inadequate. I'd love to be the kind of person that drifts off into the garden with a slim volume of Elizabethan verse or a sheaf of haikus, but my passion is story.
I grew up with an abundance of things from our garden, so fried food was not enjoyable.
I hate roses. Don't you? It's all right if you can hide them in a cutting garden, but I think a rose garden is the height of ick.
The classic Italian green sauce, salsa verde, is easy to make and especially nice in the spring when bunches of fresh herbs start appearing in the farmers market or in your garden.
I think of myself as the little girl Renoir painted with the watering can. I loved the garden colors.
Did perpetual happiness in the Garden of Eden maybe get so boring that eating the apple was justified?
I've reread 'The Secret Garden' every year as an adult. I have a battered copy on my bookshelf - it's really quite a mess! The experience of reading the novel keeps deepening for me.
I used to love wildlife as a kid and being outside in the garden and the woods and the field and that stuff.