Great storytellers in the past would go to an unknown land and return to tell the stories they've found. Those were also journeys into their inner psyches and that's still true today. An actor, a writer, does that as if saying, 'Here's what I've discovered about myself and about the world I'm in. I would like to share this with you.'
If I could throw my phone away, I would probably do it. It's always on silent, and I don't like when it rings and people are calling. We could live without those things in the past when we just had a phone on the street somewhere, on the corner or at the house. I have no interest in telling all the people what I do every day and where I am.
I don't mind letting people in a little bit, but I have learned from the past not to talk too much about my relationships and to keep things as private as possible.
I see a lot of actors that are doing things to please their coaches, their teachers in the past. They say 'No' to parts they should have said 'Yes' to simply because of the opinion of people in their past. I have no one in my past who is judging me and saying, 'Maybe you shouldn't do that.' I'll do it all.
I always felt that, when I saw Denzel or Viola do scenes in their past films or past projects, that if it's a heavy scene, and it's requiring a lot of emotional weight, that we would have nothing but silence and incense burning in between takes just to keep things quiet.
As a memoirist, I may claim to write the easier-to-remember things, but I could also just be writing to sweep them away. 'Don't bother me about my past,' I'll say, 'It's out in paperback now.'
Present-day Spain translates as many books into Spanish, annually, as the Arab world has translated into Arabic in the past 1,100 years.
You can get a bit bored of finding out about yourself. I know nothing about politics, for instance. There's nothing that's stopped me picking up a newspaper in the past, and it's something I really should start to do.
We are at a crossroads in the music business: with the rise of the internet, the world we live in has changed, and the past is not coming back. But I see the glass as half-full: the internet and social networking are new avenues for the next Bob Dylan to be born on.
I am not ashamed of anything - not my past, not my affairs, not my body, and most definitely not my desire.
If somebody from the past doesn't rise up from the grave and start talking to me, I haven't got a book. I have to hear that voice, the voice of the narrator. How she sounds will tell me who she is, and who she is will tell me how she will act - and that starts the plot in motion.
My past is very interesting, and I treasure it, but to write about it, it's just not on my radar.
To be converted you have to destroy your past, destroy your history. You have to stamp on it, you have to say 'my ancestral culture does not exist, it doesn't matter.'
Citizens, not less generous than myself, let your most precious moments be employed in causing the past to be forgotten; let all my fellow-citizens swear never to recall the past; let them receive their misled brethren with open arms, and let them, in future, be on their guard against the traps of bad men.
Italy remained attached to conservatism. It had a political class that lived in the past and didn't build the future. The past is our strength, but it risks becoming our ruin if we walk with our heads turned backwards.
Given Mr. Obama's lack of experience as an executive, and his past performance in crises such as the oil spill, it is reasonable for those of us who support the effort in Afghanistan to worry that he will not be up to the job.
For people like me, who have blocked out a chunk of their past, you wonder - if you open that door, if you walk into that room of your memories, what will happen? Will it destroy you or will it make you stronger?
I think really what needs to happen is the people of the United States need to stand up and say, 'Oil is an energy model from the past. It doesn't work for the planet, it doesn't work for the people, it never has and it never will.'
I kind of put people from the past up on a pedestal; I don't think, in a lot of ways, that we're at their level.
True conservatives fear anything that is at odds with the status quo, even to the extent of being unable to recognise when the status quo represents injustice. And reactionary conservatives actually want to tear down the gains of the past.
I've been a working actor for many years, but it's not always been successful for me. I certainly struggled in the past.
Everything about 'Hugo' to me is poignant, from the broken orphan to the old man losing his past to the fragility of film itself.
Success in past U.S. conflicts has not been strictly the result of military leadership but rather the judgment of the president in choosing generals and setting broad strategy.
The past is past and I guess if you live in the past, you cease to live.
Right now people are interested in genetic engineering to help the human race. That's a noble cause, and that's where we should be heading. But once we get past that - once we understand what genetic diseases we can deal with - when we start thinking about the future, there's an opportunity to create some new life-forms.
We always project into the future or reflect in the past, but we are so little in the present.
I love creating that community and writing about that place, because I think, in some ways, Bois Sauvage is like the DeLisle of my past; it's like the DeLisle of the '80s that I can never return to. So in some ways, when I write about Bois Sauvage, I'm writing about a home that I've lost.
With a face like this, there aren't a lot of lawyers or priest roles coming my way. I've got a face that was meant for a mug shot, and that's what I've been doing for the past thirty years.
I can't talk about every single film I made. It's not my way to go back into the past and to look at my old pictures and to discuss them.
In the past, a lot of films based on video games think that the audience wants to experience what it's like to play the game, and that's absolutely not the case.
Over the past two years, the Obama Administration and USDA have worked to build a foundation for sustainable economic growth in rural America. At the center of our vision is an effort to increase domestic production and use of renewable energy.
I think when it comes to pop I'm past the point of curiosity. I admit to a full-on obsession with it, and I think it's getting worse, actually.
Little kids grow up discovering the world that's shown to them and then when you become a teenager, it kind of shrinks a little bit. I think when you get past that point, one of the important things is that you see there is more to the world than yourself.
I won't play past 30. Why? I want to - I don't know - start a family, live life.
No innovation in the past 200 years has done more to save lives and improve health than the sanitation revolution triggered by invention of the toilet. But it did not go far enough. It only reached one-third of the world.
Those who today always look for disciplinarian solutions, those who long for an exaggerated doctrinal 'security,' those who stubbornly try to recover a past that no longer exists - they have a static and inward-directed view of things. In this way, faith becomes an ideology among other ideologies.
