French people don't breastfeed. And I did it. My mum freaked out. She didn't get it at all. French royalty thought it wasn't chic to breastfeed their kids, so they would send them to a wet nurse. It's looked down on.
I never thought Cathy would get married in the comic strip. And I also thought I would never get married.
There was Pauline de Rothschild, who I thought was very fabulous, and Millicent Rogers, the Standard Oil heiress, very chic, very clever, very original. I admired both those women very much. And I had a great example with my mother, who was extremely chic.
To be frank, I don't think President Obama gives much thought to Africa - or gives much to Africa.
I saw this cool interview with Amy Adams from when she did 'Enchanted' and played a princess, and when kids came up to her with no make-up and ripped jeans on, she said, 'I'm off duty. I'm an off-duty princess', and I thought that was quite sweet.
I read a lot of bad scripts and weird television shows. I don't know. There's a lot of work out there I was reading at 14 years old and noticing this lack of thought. And then, reading 'Afterschool,' that's full of thought. It was bursting with ideas.
Since I grew up, I have never deliberately used any technique at all other than the physical shaping of my tale so that it more or less resembles what has been thought of as a novel for these last two hundred years.
Once I moved to Chicago and started trying to get acting jobs, I just tended to book more things that were comedically based than anything else. I never had the preconceived notion, 'I will be a comedic actor.' I just thought, 'I'll go into acting and see what kind of work I can get.'
While I was at community college, I studied industrial design because I thought maybe I'd be an automotive designer - I grew up in Detroit - and I also studied, geology because I was interested in science, a little bit.
No one in my family had ever been in politics. My dad thought it was something that got in the way.
I never had a burning desire to have children. But then I met Nick, and I thought, 'This is the only person I'd do this with.' So we tried, but I was a little long in the tooth for that sort of thing. But we didn't turn it into a soap opera. We tried for about a year or so, and it didn't happen and took that to mean it wasn't meant to be.
When I left Europe in 1987 I did so with the thought that my relevance as a composition teacher would benefit from a certain cool distance to certain tendencies I had been observing for several years with increasing disquiet.
I thought that if one wanted to be a writer, one had to write novels because I didn't know that one could be a poet.
When I was younger - it might be a romantic idea - I always thought I might go crazy.
Sometimes I get really down on myself for not having the exact career I want, but it's ok as long as you know what you want and you're going towards that. Accept it's going to be a different path than you thought in the first place.
I grew up in a very small town, but it happened to be in western Massachusetts, where there were a lot of gay people. I remember my aunt going to a gay wedding when I was 11, and I thought it was the coolest thing.
When I saw the Penderecki concert in London, in '92 or '93, I thought there were speakers in the room. It was just strings. But I could hear these kind of buzzings and rumblings, and I was like, 'Where is this all coming from?' And that was just better, to my ears. Odder, stranger, more magical.
I have generally sought to work on questions that I thought were both interesting and approachable, yet not too widely appreciated. To struggle to make discoveries that would be made by others a short time later seems futile to me.
So, you know, Nathaniel was my first child, born when I was 40, so, uh... And then in due course, he wanted a brother, and then I thought, 'Oh, that'll be bloody lucky!' So, we ended up adopting a beautiful boy who was then five years old, from Ethiopia.
For a long time, I thought when you do a box set, you're giving up; you're saying, 'OK, I don't have anything left.' But now I've listened to some of the old stuff I haven't heard in 20 to 40 years with fresh ears. It's like, 'Oh yeah, I can see where people might want to to hear some of this stuff that didn't make it onto the records.'
Some people thought Theophilus was a fake name. Whatever.
Discontent with this world gives such a painful longing to quit it that, if the heart finds comfort, it is solely from the thought that God wishes it to remain here in banishment.
I had a major bug for cities and for paintings and literature and all the things I thought went on in cities.
Sad music, I always thought, is more beautiful than other music. But at the same time, I am in my personal life a very happy guy. I have a sense of humor. I am not the kind of depressed guy all the time brooding. No. I am very enthusiastic about things.
The leaders come up from the volunteers that do the work, and it's amazing because then they do these incredible things in their community that they never thought they had the power to make that happen.
I've never really worked out this thought, and I don't know if I'm really conscious of it, but I can see there's an attraction about writing about a period that's over and isn't going to change colour while you look at it.
I love kids, so two things that I have thought about are being a pediatrician or a kindergarten teacher.
I've always believed that if you are precise in your thoughts, it's not the lines you say that are important - it's what exists between the lines. What I'm compelled by most is that transparency of thought, what is left unspoken.
While I was doing these plays in the beginning, I wasn't getting paid. I thought of it more as a hobby. Then I realized how seriously a lot of these people took what they were doing.
When I was ten, I saw 'Grease' on stage and thought: 'I want to be part of that; it looks like so much fun.' My mum enrolled me in a local theatre group, and it all went from there.
How quick are we to learn: that is, to imitate what others have done or thought before. And how slow to understand: that is, to see the deeper connections.
When I started 'City of Bones,' I knew exactly what was going to happen in 'City of Glass.' When I first started the six-book series, I thought of it as a three-book series.
We're passionate musicians, but we felt classical concerts were more like a funeral because nobody talked and everybody was dressed so conservatively. We thought that's kind of strange, because music is full of life! We thought we could break through that barrier with theater and comedy elements.
My dad, bless him, was a musician. And his dad had thought that his music was rubbish.
I always thought it would be a great thing to do an art carwash. So you can actually go and get your car washed, but while you're sitting around waiting you can walk in that hallway where you look at the cars going through the window, and that could be changing exhibitions.
My kids mean more to me than anything I thought was important when I was younger.
