As a regent, I hope to bring that important perspective of a typical family visitor in combination with my background as a Member of Congress and a proponent of the Smithsonian's efforts to reach all Americans.
Before anyone learns my last name, they always assume I have some type of Latin background in me somewhere. I love it! I think the Latin culture is sexy. It's one of my goals to learn to speak Spanish one day; then I will really be able to fool people!
Sometimes there's a snobbery among literary types that these people don't really get it, but in a lot of ways they get it more than the literati. There's a culture in the background that they understand and know. They get that deeper level.
My background was in graphic design, but when I was doing it, it was all hand-drawn stuff, not computers.
When you have a background in combat sports, people think you're this martial arts expert, but really I'm just a guy who is able to do certain things without making a mess of himself.
My background is in theoretical physics, and it's something very close to my heart.
One difference between poetry and lyrics is that lyrics sort of fade into the background. They fade on the page and live on the stage when set to music.
It was very useful to learn the history, the theory, and the art of building from a practical background.
I got overwhelmed by the magnitude of the celebrity culture in America. My background is as a news journalist, and newsrooms in the US are shrinking - investigation teams are being terminated or shrunk on newspapers all around the country. The one aspect that's expanded is coverage of celebrity culture.
I grew up on food stamps. I come from a very humble background. And I've had many friends that have been destitute - you know, running into trouble - and places like The Midnight Mission have given them hope and have fed them and gotten them back on the right path.
I do write long, long character notes - family background, history, details of appearance - much more than will ever appear in the novel. I think this is what lifts a book from that early calculated, artificial stage.
I would say that although my music may be or may have been part of the cultural background fabric of the gay community, I consider myself an outsider who belongs everywhere and nowhere... Being a human being is what truly counts. That's where you'll find me.
It takes a couple of years just to get the background and knowledge that you need before you can go into detailed training for your mission.
To create characters, one must build background. And one of the tools we use is improvisation.
Our co-founder and company president, Jim Levy, came from a record industry background and understood the marketing and promotion of artists as well as products. So the video game business went from absolutely zero designer credit to something approaching rock star promotion.
Music is my passion, singing, performing. I play piano and musical theater is my background.
But I would lie on the floor and analyze everything. I'd listen to all the strings and the background vocals on the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack and try to pick out the different instruments.
One day I was in Starbucks going through one of my books on accounting, and this beautiful young woman came up to me and said, 'My accounting book is different from yours.' Her name was Joyce, she had a background in finance and administration and ran a surgery center. Within a short time, we were married.
Christianity emerged from the religion of Israel. Or rather, it has as its background a persistent strain in that religion. To that strain Christians have looked back, and rightly, as the preparation in history for their faith.
A classic is a work which persists as a background noise even when a present that is totally incompatible with it holds sway.
So if you want to have a great video game-based movie you have to keep the mood of the game, use the normal character setup - but you have to flesh out the story and provide more background for the characters.
Practically everyone I know now is from a middle- or upper-middle-class background, and I no longer have the huge chip on my shoulder that I carried around for so many years. I'm not sure it comes out much in the work, but coming from this kind of background is absolutely central to my identity, to my sense of who I am.
The Mekons were kind of like the background music of my life.
I'm a Catholic by background. I was raised in Goa, a part of India that was visited by Portuguese missionaries a few hundred years ago, which explains my last name.
The American landscape has no foreground and the American mind no background.
When you have such a huge past, a big background as we have, you can play off that - a lot of people do. But we felt we wouldn't have a legitimate future unless we put something new together.
I came to accept during my freshman year that many of the gaps in my knowledge and understanding were simply limits of class and cultural background, not lack of aptitude or application as I'd feared.
Whenever I have had to write fiction, I've always had to invent a character who roughly has my background.
Becoming a model was very counter-culture for my background, which is hyper-liberal, academic and feminist.
There's nothing in my background that would have said I was destined to be a senior politician.
The relationship I have to my fatherland is like that of mothers with crippled children: they love them all the more, the more crippled they are. Germany is the background of all my plans, the return to Germany.
I really look up to actors like Gwyneth Paltrow and Cate Blanchett who have a strong background in theatre.
As the books grew bigger and more ambitious, the situations in question sometimes became political ones, and so it became necessary to start painting in the social background on a scale which eventually became panoramic.
Even if you don't state your ethnic background anywhere on LinkedIn or whether you are married with children, a scan of your photos and other people's photos featuring you will make it far easier to deduce.
You do tend to miss that repetition of day in and day out in a restaurant. I would like to open someplace where I can get back in touch with that side of my restaurant background. It is something we have plans to do and not sure how or when, but it is not too far away.
No novel is a clone of any preceding one, though with a background cast of characters and things that has grown to thousands, there are many familiar aspects.
