To look at ourselves from afar, to make the subjective suddenly objective: this gives us a psychic shock.
I just couldn't go back to Suddenly Susan after David Strickland's suicide. I didn't see how we could make the show light and funny any more.
Sometimes I'll come up with a lick that I really love, and I'll try to put the right words to it for years. Suddenly something comes to me that works just right.
Stamps from Afghanistan are hilarious. You can tell when the revolutions are because suddenly they stop having pictures of the mullahs and the independence monument and they start having fish on them.
I enjoyed being in 'The Ten Commandments.' That was a great experience - to suddenly become one of those holy people. I was holier than thou.
We play a hip-hop song and suddenly 25 people on the left jump up and put their hands in the air; then you play Lost Cause and they're like, I don't know about this one.
Suddenly a single shot on the extreme left rang out on the clear morning air, followed quickly by several others, and the whole line pushed rapidly forward through the brush.
In December 1989, my mother died very suddenly, and that sparked a re-evaluation of what I was doing, and I realized I was mediocre at everything. I was a mediocre IBM employee, I was a mediocre entrepreneur, I was a mediocre artist. I decided that, although my mom wouldn't be around to see it, I wanted to be great at something.
At those times I got into... I suppose you call it a rut. I used to do comedy, comedy, comedy and I suddenly thought I ought to break away from this somehow.
Yeah, but now suddenly - you know, universities are notoriously market oriented, too.
Looking out at the ocean, it's easy to feel small - and to imagine all your troubles, suddenly insignificant, slipping away. Earth's seven oceans seem vast and impenetrable, but a closer look tells another story.
It is a common enough case, that of a man being suddenly captivated by a woman nearly the opposite of his ideal.
After I retired and came off the road, I gathered up all my musical instruments and suddenly, I wanted them all to be perfect.
My life is fairly normal. I didn't wake up one morning and find out that I'm suddenly a star, with people clamoring at me. I feel like I'm moving up the ladder just a little, which is fine.
You can suddenly have a series of countries waking up and saying, 'I want the same status as the Brits,' which will be, de facto, the dismantling of the rest of Europe.
One day during filming, George Clooney was wearing his surf shirt and board shorts, and my six-year-old daughter was in the background as an extra, playing in the sand - playing herself. She and Clooney suddenly looked equally Hawaiian, equally related to the place I call home.
Out of economic hardship can come change - we are suddenly cast onto our wits and our talents and our resources and our strengths, as we lose all the choices we once had.
You think your life is going one way and then suddenly, you're on another track.
In the '70s, the newspaper guild managed to get people paid what they were worth, but the reporters suddenly became middle class. It's much more respectable, more uptight, and everyone speaks in guarded tones. And the writing isn't as good. We always had guys who were failed poets and failed novelists who did it to eat.
For girls and women, talk is the glue that holds a relationship together - and the explosive that can blow it apart. That's why you can think you're having a perfectly amiable chat, then suddenly find yourself wounded by the shrapnel from an exploded conversation.
I did not study science at school until I was 13, when I was totally turned on by a seemingly dreary old teacher who suddenly, unannounced, manufactured a huge explosion in the middle of a totally boring monologue. From then on, all of his class wanted to make explosions.
The experience of having a child does crack you wide open. I felt like I suddenly had to rebuild the skin that I'd grown over the years before having a child. Perhaps that might be quite interesting in terms of acting.
We joined a Conservative synagogue. I began learning through engagement, rote and reading. Suddenly, I belonged... well, to the extent that a novelist can ever feel she is part of a group; we may be part of a minyan, but we're not fully merged into the community.
Writing books and being paid for it - it's not like winning the Lottery. You can't suddenly go, 'Yippee!' and start throwing tenners in the air. I've done pretty well out of it, but certainly not enough to say, 'Right, that's me set up for life.'
For Nirvana, putting out their first major-label record was like getting into a new car. But the runaway success was like suddenly discovering that the car was a Ferrari and the accelerator pedal was Krazy Glued to the floorboard.
'The Walking Dead' do such a great job with that world. It is real, but it's also otherworldly; it's strangely theatrical, and I suddenly did become quite invested in the whole zombie phenomenon.
It's an often-asked question, 'Why did all these spotty white English boys suddenly start playing blues in the '60s?' It was recognized as this kind of vibrant music and when I first started playing in a blues band I just wanted to bring it to a wider public who hadn't really heard it.
Choosing to write a play is some kind of surrender. I don't make an outline. I sit and work, and suddenly the door opens, and out it comes.
My first tic was to shake my head violently. I was in karate class, and I was shaking violently. All of a sudden, I just started to notice that the teacher was looking at me, and all the kids were wondering what I was doing. I suddenly felt really strange.
As soon as 'Hide Away' came out, it was like everyone knew who I was, and I started getting all this attention. It was hard to get used to at first. I just remember that I suddenly couldn't walk down the hallways without hearing a classmate or teacher playing it - it was unreal!
The American society around me looked at me and saw Japanese. Then, when I was 19, I went to Japan for the first time. And suddenly - what a shock - I realized I wasn't Japanese; they saw me as American. It was an enormous relief. Now I just appreciate being exactly in the middle.
I grew up in this little farm town, and I've always dreamt of Hollywood and pop culture, and then I suddenly found myself plopped in the middle of it.
I have a lot of land. I bought it because I had a very strong feeling. I was in my early twenties, and I had grown up in Los Angeles and had seen that city slide off into the sea from the city I knew as a little kid. It lost its identity - suddenly there was cement everywhere and the green was gone and the air was bad - and I wanted out.
It was so emotional to step onto the Millennium Falcon set because that was the play set we all had when we were kids. Suddenly, you were standing in the real thing. There's this rush of unreality about it.
Talk radio has made an enormous run around establishment media. But the Internet is making an end run around talk radio. Suddenly we're faced with an information age.
Whenever you want something that you're not going to get, suddenly the whiney 3-year-old comes out in you.
