I think people like players they can relate to. It seems as if people think they know me. I just think I'm an ordinary Joe who plays golf very, very well.
Chinese martial artists consider themselves to be gardeners, and it's an honor for them to take care of this garden, to better it and hand it over to the generations that follow. I think that's a very important message in a time when personal achievement seems to be the only criteria of success.
American policy seems to be wed to a perpetual state of war. Why? History shows that the world will always be in flux or turmoil, with different peoples competing for visibility and power. The U.S. cannot fix the fate of every nation.
A snow day literally and figuratively falls from the sky, unbidden, and seems like a thing of wonder.
'Star Trek' seems to be an appeal to our better nature, the side of ourselves that works toward peace and cooperation and understanding and knowledge and yearns to seek out knowledge rather than the side that wants to divide and control one another.
For one thing, I don't think art needs to be about suffering; sometimes it really seems like it's only the art about pain that is interpreted as profound, and in my work for years I've really tried to deal with subjects that are substantial, not just fluffy, but presented in a more playful, approachable kind of way.
The earth is rocky and full of roots; it's clay, and it seems doomed and polluted, but you dig little holes for the ugly shriveled bulbs, throw in a handful of poppy seeds, and cover it all over, and you know you'll never see it again - it's death and clay and shrivel, and your hands are nicked from the rocks, your nails black with soil.
When you're a teenager, everything seems like the end of the world, and I don't think that's necessarily a silly thing. You're waking up and becoming aware that the world has problems and those problems affect you, whereas when you're young they don't seem to affect you that much even if you're aware of them.
The rivalry between the Montague and the Capulet kids seems very modern to me. Juliet is a free spirit, full of untapped love and passion. I think a lot of girls can relate to her. And it's very relevant in terms of kids defying their parents.
It seems there is no area in our culture that is not touched, changed, even swallowed by the Internet. It's both medium and message, mass and personal, social and solitary.
When anyone starts out to do something creative - especially if it seems a little unusual - they seek approval, often from those least inclined to give it. But a creative life cannot be sustained by approval, any more than it can be destroyed by criticism - you learn this as you go on.
Members of Congress are somewhat reluctant to tangle with a president who seems to have the backing of the American people.
I have come across both inspiring teachers of history and deplorable ones over the years, so one cannot generalise, except perhaps to observe that the profession seems to encourage anti-militarist sentiments.
When a man and a woman have an overwhelming passion for each other, it seems to me, in spite of such obstacles dividing them as parents or husband, that they belong to each other in the name of Nature, and are lovers by Divine right, in spite of human convention or the laws.
To me, the idea that any kind of disaster helps create a nation seems a ridiculous one. There was no family in the house on the land next to me, and there might have been.
The interesting thing is that it seems like George W. Bush would have been happy being the president of anything. He could have been president of Major League Baseball.
The Chinese banking system is built on quicksand and that's the one thing a lot of people don't realize. Everybody seems to think it is a free and clear open checkbook. It's not. The banking system in China is extremely fragile.
I had been watching the Emmys since I was probably 5 years old. Those shows, when you're a kid, it all seems like such a big, big deal, and only special certain people would win one of these big things like a Tony or an Emmy or an Oscar.
In 18th-century Scotland, the main event was the Jacobite rebellion under Bonnie Prince Charlie, so that seems like a nice dramatic backdrop.
When you look back on music history, it falls into these neat periods, but of course, the period you yourself are living through seems totally scattered and chaotic.
There are people who are just suicidal, regardless. They are built to self-destruct. It seems, in my family, like a virus that's resistant to any kind of help or care or medication.
The short story seems like the best of all possible worlds. I do feel it is closer to writing poetry than to writing a novel, with its requirements of concentration and economy.
For some reason, the military seems more afraid of gay people than they are against terrorists, but they're very brave with the terrorists... If the terrorists ever got a hold of this information, they'd get a platoon of lesbians to chase us out of Baghdad.
I think humans have always wrestled with the Divine Idea - an idea that unites and separates, creates and destroys, consoles and terrifies. Throughout human history, it is an idea that seems sometimes to have caused whole populations to rise up and slaughter one another.
Experience seems to most of us to lead to conclusions, but empiricism has sworn never to draw them.
I don't know Laura Bush. But she seems to be calm, and she has a sparkle in her eye, which is good. But I don't know that she's ever had a real job - I mean, since she's been grown up.
Everyone seems to have this awareness of Charlie Chaplin because he was a really good businessman while Buster Keaton wasn't.
The process of writing a novel begins with a pang, a moment of recognition, and a situation, a character, or something you read in a paper, that seems to go off, like a solar flare inside your head.
Strengths are not activities you're good at, they're activities that strengthen you. A strength is an activity that before you're doing it you look forward to doing it; while you're doing it, time goes by quickly and you can concentrate; after you've done it, it seems to fulfill a need of yours.
For me, the dialogue is the easiest part of writing. It just always seems so obvious what a character will say. Maybe it's because I talk too much!
Writing a short story is like painting a picture on the head of a pin. And just getting everything to fit is - sometimes seems impossible. Writing a novel, though, is - has its own challenges of scope. And I think of that as painting a mural, where the challenge is that if you are close enough to work on it, you're too close to see the whole thing.
Writing with kids is an adventure. It seems like someone always has the flu or pink-eye. I mean, you don't even have to be in direct contact with anyone to get pink-eye. But for parents who write, flexibility becomes essential, and as long as I have a pad of paper and a pen, I can write anywhere. Starbucks is fine.
That seems to me the great American danger we're all in, that we'll bargain away the experience of being alive for the appearance of it.
Directly after the show people might have responded better to it, but who really knows. It did what it did and while it seems like a failure to most but it was a success for me and has given me so many opportunities.
My deepest impulses are optimistic, an attitude that seems to me as spiritually necessary and proper as it is intellectually suspect.
I'm trying to find a way to eat up time without being destructive, 'cause that's my go-to, it seems.
