I love the line of Flaubert about observing things very intensely. I think our duty as writers begins not with our own feelings, but with the powers of observing.
The emergence and spread of virulent strains of avian influenza has been attributed by experts to the intensely overcrowded, unsanitary, and stressful conditions that often characterize large-scale factory farming in industrialized agriculture.
Politics is intensely physical: your hands touch, clasp and hold, and your eyes are always reaching for contact. None of this came naturally to me. I'd always put my trust in words and let the words do the work, but in politics, the real message is physical.
By its birth, and for all time, Christianity is pledged to the Cross and dominated by the sign of the Cross. It cannot remain its own self except by identifying itself ever more intensely with the essence of the Cross.
I have loved deeply. I have lost intensely. I will never love again. I get that love by people who care for me.
I prefer directing to acting. There is huge freedom that comes from being behind the camera. It brings a lot of responsibilities as well but is intensely rewarding.
The characters that I want to play are interesting women. I don't care if they're good women or bad women or vulnerable women or women with a lot of faults or women that we dislike intensely who are malicious.
There are all kinds of ways in which women, together, change the world. And I don't mean that in a cheesy way. I'm not somebody who believes all women should support each other. I believe very strongly in women critiquing each other, just not critiquing each other more intensely because they're women.
Robert Pattinson has the face of a film-noir dupe. It's a face that is searching and open and kind. It's a face that a certain type of woman might want to fool because, in its intensely old-fashioned kindness, the face says, I love you. Fool me.
I believe that love between people is the greatest life-giving force in the world. It's intensely frustrating and inevitably makes a fool of you, but you can't stop going back to it, and it's pretty much the defining experience of a human being.
Violence can be very grotesque and also intensely attractive. What interests me is how the two - beauty and violence - live side by side, and how moments can be created and erased almost simultaneously. Destruction is painful, but at times it can be very cathartic.
Writing poetry makes you intensely conscious of how words sound, both aloud and inside the head of the reader. You learn the weight of words and how they sound to the ear.
Live life intensely - I've always believed in that.
Philadelphians are intensely loyal. They don't switch teams even when the Sixers lose by 63 points or the Phillies finish last in the NL East.
The idea of personal salvation is intensely repugnant to me when it is not absurd. Imagine Roosevelt, the big brute, preserving his personality in a future state and swaggering about as a celestial Rough Rider!
I've always been inspired by small details that make me wander. My mother would ask me, 'What are you looking at so intensely?' I would answer, 'Everything and nothing.' She really supported my wanderings, called me Marco Polo.
Men make love more intensely at 20, but make love better, however, at 30.
