Following the rise of the Labour Party it seemed reasonable, in 1927, to expect, or at least hope, that co-operation for the common good might gradually replace the competitiveness of capitalism.
Having bought furniture for my own house, and bought furniture for our house in Washington, a furniture store seemed like a good idea, and it also played into my personal history.
When I first started writing, I was living in England and I had that uniquely English sense of sarcasm, which has definitely seemed to have left me. I am a naturalized American and my sensibility has become far more American.
As kids, we had no clue about the racial stuff that seemed to preoccupy adults. We just enjoyed our life as kids.
Growing up in Hollywood it seemed like every kid was the child of some star.
Basically, as soon as I saw that there was a role available on '24,' I jumped at it, and then when I sat down and talked to them, it seemed to get more interesting and more fun.
The payoffs in showbiz seemed as random as a slot machine.
Over the last decade, economists seemed to share a broad consensus about economic policy, with the old splits between monetarists and Keynesians apparently being settled by events. But the Great Recession of the last two years has changed everything.
Occasionally, I would focus on a particular school project and become obsessed with, what seemed to my mother, to be trivial details instead of apportioning the time I spent on school work in a more efficient way.
When I began writing science fiction in the middle '60s, it seemed very easy to find ideas that took decades to percolate into the cultural consciousness; now the lead time seems more like eighteen months.
I had a hard time at Chelsea mainly because I was injured much of the time. Every time I recovered from one injury I seemed to get a new one and it set me back again.
For me, the teen years were all about searching for a place for myself, wondering why I seemed so different than everyone else, wondering especially why no one could look past the surface and figure out who I really was underneath.
I'd always liked movies in a kind of naive way. They seemed no less improbable a career than anything else.
The participation of the people in their own government was the more significant, because the colonies actually had what England only seemed to have, - three departments of government.
When I was growing up, I was so fascinated by Mel Blanc and all of the different voices that he did for 'Looney Tunes' and watching Robin Williams record voice-over for the genie in 'Aladdin.' It always seemed to be a major honor - something you have to earn. Like people trust you when they want to have you there without seeing you.
One of the things I respected about Connors was that one second he would be spewing a four-letter word, the next second he would do something that had people falling off the aisles. Yet he never seemed to lose his concentration.
It occurred to me that I just didn't see how I could go ahead and continue to eat meat. It just seemed so... cannibalistic to me. And so, I'm a vegetarian, and I have been ever since.
I grew up loving actresses or actors who were very classy but who seemed a little bit mysterious because you couldn't grasp what they're really thinking. I mean, Grace Kelly always looked impossibly glamorous, yet you could always see there was something behind her eyes.
I've become impossible, holding on to when everything seemed to matter more.
If you asked somebody, 'what do you wish for in life?' they wouldn't say 'happiness.' I would have answered 'excitement, knowledge,' God knows - I mean, many, many different things, but certainly not 'happiness'. It seemed like a foreign concept to wish for something that specific and that singular.
When I was in my teens and 20s, I looked to older Italian and French women. They always seemed so incredibly attractive to me because of their confidence. And because their faces had evidence of age: lines, dark circles, and half-lidded eyes, it made that confidence so rebellious. And that was incredibly attractive to me.
Eisenhower was less deferential to the military than he seemed likely to be, Kennedy was not at all beholden to the pope, George W. Bush was smarter than portrayed and Barack Obama has not led a charge from the left - least of all on behalf of the civil liberties that have eroded since September 11, 2001.
And as soon as I did the research, I realized the law seemed to be on my side and I filed the suit.
The interesting thing about my character Sylar is that my strengths as an actor seemed to go completely against the shape of a character in the shadow.
It seemed to me you could do anything in comics. So I started doing my thing, which is mainly influenced by novelists, stand-up comedians, that sort of thing.
The only thing I liked about Christmas as a kid was the gifts; otherwise, it just seemed like a stressful time.
In the United States in the 20th century, every major event that America was going through, there was a boxer who seemed to symbolically represent it, from slavery to the Vietnam War to the Depression - all the way along, you just seemed to have boxers that carried the narrative.
I knew nothing of the real life of a musician, but I seemed to see myself standing in front of great crowds of people, playing my accordion.
We all shared an admiration of Debussy both as a musician and as sort of an icon for the 20th century. It seemed like an interesting idea to go right back 100 years to find the source of some new ideas now.
I was writing a script about the Joker menacing a regular person who had strayed into his path, and I needed to give him a gang of henchmen to work with him. The idea occurred to me, let's put in a female henchperson, because that seemed like a fun variation on the regular big thug guys.
These are strange times. Reason, which once combatted faith and seemed to have conquered it, now has to look to faith to save it from dissolution.
If getting a contract was relatively straightforward, writing fiction was far harder than I could have imagined, and there were moments during the long and torturous edit process when it seemed that 'Zulu Hart,' the first of the trilogy, would never be fit for public consumption.
Money was always on my mind when I was growing up. So I was always wondering how we were going to afford this and that. Acting seemed to be a shortcut out of the mess.
I was a little hesitant at taking the job at Atari. I had never programmed for a living and I worried it might get boring (building circuits seemed more fun). But I would probably still be in the video game business.
Letters had always defeated distance, but with the coming of e-mail, time seemed to be vanquished as well.
The way we got Phil Collins for 'Tarzan' was that we heard around the studio that he was looking for a Disney project, and we got him. It seemed like a perfect match. Phil is a great musician.
