My mum was Labour-voting, but wanted us to know we were important. Basically, everyone's equal, but you, my children, are a bit better.
For us, the pressure comes from internal matter of having recorded eight records.
Ideological warriors whether from the Left or the Right are bad news for the bench. They tend to make law, not interpret law. And that's not what any of us should want from our judges.
My mother hid the struggle from us children. She complained about her salary, and she had a tough time. Although she became a headmistress, she still had to do a lot of sewing. The more I think about her, the more remarkable I realise she was. And she understood straight away when I said that I wanted to write.
I can understand why Christians call us heretics. But most important, who will God call a heretic? From God's point of view, my revelation is deeply orthodox.
Men don't know much about women. We do know when they're happy. We know when they're crying, and we know when they're pissed off. We just don't know in what order these are gonna come at us.
Nothing so soothes our vanity as a display of greater vanity in others; it make us vain, in fact, of our modesty.
And this President wakes up every morning, looks out across America and is proud to announce, 'It could be worse.' It could be worse? Is that what it means to be an American? It could be worse? Of course not. What defines us as Americans is our unwavering conviction that we know it must be better.
I grew up in a Hindu household but went to a Roman Catholic school. I grew up with a mother who said, 'I'll arrange a marriage for you at 18,' but she also said that we could achieve anything we put our minds to an encourage us to dream of becoming prime minister or president.
So I think, if September 11 taught us anything, it taught us that we're vulnerable, and vulnerable in ways that we didn't fully understand.
It goes way, way back when we were under Sweden's rule. We always think they are better than us. We played against them so often for so many years. Every country has one opponent they want to beat and for us, it's Sweden.
As little boys, my brother and I used to spend hours with my grandmother, asking her about the details of how she came to America. She could only give us a smattering of details, but they all found their way into our collective imagination, eventually becoming a part of our own cultural identity and connection to the past.
Usually when we go in to cut demos, one of us will lay down some mumbling sort of stuff for the vocal melodies because the lyrics don't come until later.
It seems to me that everything that happens to us is a disconcerting mix of choice and contingency.
In the Tea Party narrative, victory at the polls means a new American revolution, one that will 'take our country back' from everyone they disapprove of. But what they don't realize is, there's a catch: This is America, and we have an entrenched oligarchical system in place that insulates us all from any meaningful political change.
I've been invited to appear on Letterman, but they wanted me to talk about a funny videotape of Congress. 'Bring us your outtakes!' That's not our job.
If we think a playoff spot's not in the cards, there will be no concern for appearances or cosmetics whatsoever. We'll continue to address our future and trade off some pieces that would keep us respectable.
We've only explored about 5% of our ocean. There are great discoveries yet to be made down there - fantastic creatures representing millions of years of evolution and possibly bioactive compounds that could benefit us in ways we can't even imagine.
Perhaps one of the most difficult things for us to do is to choose a notable and joyous dress for men. There would be more joy in life if we were to accustom ourselves to use all the beautiful colours we can in fashioning our own clothes.
It is clear that he does not pray, who, far from uplifting himself to God, requires that God shall lower Himself to him, and who resorts to prayer not to stir the man in us to will what God wills, but only to persuade God to will what the man in us wills.
We didn't know anything about comedy duos - Abbot and Costello, Martin and Lewis - we didn't know anything about that. Kim Fields showed us a tape of Martin and Lewis and their old shows and they come through the curtain so we started doing research on them.
Sports gives us the grandest opportunity of all to talk about reaching down and helping up or getting on somebody else's shoulders.
As I've said, there were patriots who supported this war, and patriots who opposed it. And all of us are united in appreciation for our servicemen and women, and our hopes for Iraqis' future.
Yet now we are faced with the sickening suspicion that technology has run ahead of us.
After the '96 Olympics, we all started believing that this is bigger than we thought, and we were willing to do the work. We knew that it was up to us, the players, to make soccer successful.
Something happens to us all when we experience something as a unit that doesn't occur when we're on our couches or holding our little portable DVD players.
Big data is going to make us all healthier.
A good word is an easy obligation; but not to speak ill requires only our silence, which costs us nothing.
As a direct line to human feeling, empathic experience, genuine language and detail, poetry is everything that headline news is not. It takes us inside situations, helps us imagine life from more than one perspective, honors imagery and metaphor - those great tools of thought - and deepens our confidence in a meaningful world.
'Dark Shadows' was the spark that lit the fire of my childhood imagination. It wasn't polished; it wasn't perfect. But it gave us characters with real personalities and complicated motivations.
If you keep having to dip into the story's past to explain the present, then there's a good chance your real story's in the past, and you're just using the present as a vehicle to deliver us there.
These terrorists aren't trying to kill us because we offended them. They attack us because they want to impose their view of the world on as many people as they can, and America is standing in their way.
The European brand of fascism will probably present its most serious postwar threat to us via Latin America.
Why can't Google, which likes to see itself as a 'Don't Be Evil' benevolent force in society, just write us a big check for using our stories, so we can keep checks and balances alive and continue to provide the search engine with our stories?
We don't feel pressure of, 'Let's make this really raunchy.' It's more about making a good story, which is 10 times harder. The raunchy stuff's really easy for us.
Don't you want to know what's real and what's not? I remember when I was a kid, you know, this whole Cold War thing. They had us scared of the Russians. So, it's almost like, what's real and what's not?
