It's hard for me to characterise myself. I think I'm balanced. Some people might say I'm cold-hearted.
Free soloing is almost as old as climbing itself, with roots in the 19th century. Climbers are continuing to push the boundaries. There are certainly better technical climbers than me. But if I have a particular gift, it's a mental one - the ability to keep it together where others might freak out.
In the military, as in any organization, giving the order might be the easiest part. Execution is the real game.
A little girl who finds a puzzle frustrating might ask her busy mother (or teacher) for help. The child gets one message if her mother expresses clear pleasure at the request and quite another if mommy responds with a curt 'Don't bother me - I've got important work to do.'
My mother was a businesswoman; my grandmother was a businesswoman - it never occurred to me that life might be harder because you're a woman. It wasn't until later and I had a bigger sense of the world that I realised that.
Every Sri Lankan, and almost every visitor to Sri Lanka, carries a longing for the place in some small form - hiraeth, the Welsh call it - wherever they go and whatever their background. It binds them however much the war and politics might try to divide them.
Now I can broadcast to an audience of several million people on the 'Today' programme. I can talk about the day's news. But on radio, believe it or not, we have notes and scripts. And while we might ad lib the odd wryly amusing asides, they come at the frequency of a suburban bus. About one every 90 minutes.
I'm 23, so I'm not done with my life. But acting, definitely, out of what I've done so far, makes me feel the most alive and is very invigorating and thrilling. So I figured I might as well try it for a while.
Managers of hospitals over the years have been increasingly recruited from outside the health service, and although their experience of running a supermarket chain might allow them to balance the books, it does not mean they have any insight into how a ward should be managed and patients best served.
It is important for all of us to appreciate where we come from and how that history has really shaped us in ways that we might not understand.
Science fiction is huge and varied, and there's almost any sort of book or story you might imagine.
I don't think I care about the hair as much as people think I do. It's just kind of there. It's not really a big deal to me. It actually drives me nuts. It's always in my face if I don't have a hat on. I might have to get rid of it.
I have no sense of myself as a sex symbol at all. But the meaning of sex symbol might be a little different in Japan to elsewhere. The Japanese version seems to come with a stronger emphasis on a sort of grownup or mature male charm. And if that's the case, then I guess I'm happy to hear it.
An artist must be free to choose what he does, certainly, but he must also never be afraid to do what he might choose.
You might as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb.
I have no inhibitions about smoking or drinking, but I think too much of my voice to place it in jeopardy. I have spent many good years in training and cultivating it, and I would be foolish to do anything which might impair or ruin it.
I am in an adolescence in reverse, as mysterious as the first, except that this time I feel it as a decay of the odds that I might live for a while, that I can sleep it off.
Shetland is the most remote place in the U.K. It's a part our country, but completely unique. It might be British, but it's closer to Norway than to Edinburgh, and it feels very different from the mainland.
Indeed, I would feel that an appreciation of the arts in a conscious, disciplined way might help one to do science better.
I'm sure that there are places in the deserts in Australia that could be similar to where we might want to go on Mars.
I think that what drives most of us as human beings is the want for something. You might have a hope, or a big dream, or a goal that you haven't yet achieved.
The worst is when you read things on the Internet blogs, because people don't hold back. Sometimes you read wonderful things, but sometimes it's really awful stuff. Like on the Fashion Spot, for example, people always comment on you. They forget that we might read that stuff.
But I always need to identify with a character to write about him or her - and by 'identify,' I mean see the world through that person's eyes and have a strong sense of the inner logic of their acts and decisions, wacky or wrongheaded though they might be. In that sense, I think there's some of me in all of them.
I might have been born in a hovel but I am determined to travel with the wind and the stars.
Sometimes life limits your choices - rising tuition costs may put university out of reach, or like me, personal circumstances might simply make it difficult to complete your education.
We had to do a lot of rehearsals to get it so that it was playable. What it did was make you practice. That's good for any musician to have that kind of pressure. It brings things out of you that might not come out if you don't have to reach for something all the time.
I am not going to take a role because there's money. It might extend my checkbook, but not my integrity.
The news media's silence, particularly television news, is reprehensible. If we knew as much about Darfur as we do about Michael Jackson, we might be able to stop these things from continuing.
One might call habit a moral friction: something that prevents the mind from gliding over things but connects it with them and makes it hard for it to free itself from them.
Every minute you are thinking of evil, you might have been thinking of good instead. Refuse to pander to a morbid interest in your own misdeeds. Pick yourself up, be sorry, shake yourself, and go on again.
In a day when, if you insulted a man it might cost you your life, you were probably more civil.
We don't really make bad records, though some people might like some more than others. And we have never really done a bad show. So I think in a way maybe we've been taken for granted.
It was always important to me that I made a record where I really sang well, and I don't think it's happened yet. There's always a possibility with each album that I might not record again, and I wanted to produce one that I could feel was mine.
I'm happy to work when I've worked, and you've got to take the hard times with the good times. But there are times where I'm not as financially set as one might assume. So you have concerns about, 'Wow, I have this level of notoriety and... I better get a job.'
One gains a double benefit in writing about the past, conjuring up how things might have been, and at the same time acquiring a different perspective on the present.
You have to find some way of engaging with the world around you, however it's constituted. The engagement is necessarily going to be flawed. But if you do it on your own terms, you'll be able to extract some pleasure from the world. It might even make you really happy sometimes.
