My hope is that the 21st century will be the first century where there will be no violation of human rights, and to that end, Japan would like to do our outmost.
A birthday is just another day where you go to work and people give you love. Age is just a state of mind, and you are as old as you think you are. You have to count your blessings and be happy.
In days of yore, Opening Day of the baseball season was special, signifying that spring had come at last. Today, however, Opening Day sort of dribbles into existence, and the spiritual start of spring now belongs to the Masters golf tournament, where the azaleas and magnolias and dogwood bloom.
As a novelist, where do you go to tap into memories, and impressions, and sensations? It's usually, in my experience, your early life, before you started thinking of yourself as a writer, because somehow those experiences are unadulterated.
Often, we do not know where our choices will take us. This is why the best choices are often made based not on what they can bring to us, but what they will allow us to bring to others.
It's highly dishonorable to ever quit a production. I never have done it, and I can't imagine ever doing it. However, I have been in productions before where, on the first in the read-through, you feel that someone is in trouble, and indeed, actors have been let go shortly after read-throughs. I've seen that happen before.
Before babies, I worked very hard to make sure I understood my surroundings and figured out where I fit in the world, whether it was at work or in a social situation.
The doors between the old man today and the child are still open, wide open. I can stroll through my grandmother's house and know exactly where the pictures are, the furniture was, how it looked, the voice, the smells. I can move from my bed at night today to my childhood in less than a second.
There was this moment, particularly after I had my first child, where I felt like, 'I don't know if I'll ever make a record, or if this is always going to be something just floating around in my head.'
The Lusitania is important, of course, because this is where Germany began its maritime campaign using this brand-new weapon. We have to appreciate how the submarine, as a weapon against civilian shipping, was a particularly novel thing - so novel that many people at the time dismissed its potential power, its potential relevance.
The president, it seems to me, stands out as the one person in our system who is in a unique position where the checks on any lack of integrity there are more important than for anyone else in the system of government.
Creative risk taking is essential to success in any goal where the stakes are high. Thoughtless risks are destructive, of course, but perhaps even more wasteful is thoughtless caution which prompts inaction and promotes failure to seize opportunity.
Usually when I see myself in a film or on television, there's about a six-month period where I can't look at it because all I'll see are the mistakes. I'm just appalled by the person that I see.
I had read Harold Bloom's 'Where Shall Wisdom Be Found?' Late in his life, having read everything, Bloom asked which books had given him wisdom. I had just read a bunch of contemporary novels that had no wisdom for me.
Music, for me, is just about where you're at, and that's always changing.
I think all players reach a point in their career where it's natural to lose some of that hunger, that desire, to sort of break out or be a star.
Every sketch goes through a rewrite stage where a group of writers sits around a table and pitches more jokes and ideas for the piece.
Brian Eno developed systems to keep himself on edge and to keep himself in a position where he's generating ideas.
A huge part of Apple profits generated in Europe, in African countries, Middle East, and India were all booked in Ireland. And I think it is a very basic principle in taxation that your profits are taxed where the profits are generated.
The living werewolves have genuine needs and desires, which, though they may oppose ours, are valid. Even if they want to eat humans, you can't really call them evil, any more than mice can call cats evil, or chickens can call humans evil. It's all just a matter of where you're standing.
Sometimes, we've made songs where we're angry and yelling, and then there are some songs where we're just having fun and dancing and happy.
The thing about Paris, it's a great city for wandering around and buying shoes and nursing a cafe au lait for hours on end and pretending you're Baudelaire. But it's not a city where you can work.
L.A. is only where you live, because otherwise it's just a sprawling mass of everything, and I think if you live in L.A., you get a little network of places you go, and people you see, and when you leave town, you do miss those places and your friends.
In the 1820s, the U.S., Japan, and the U.K. were some of the only countries where the average population received at least two years of formal schooling.
There's two tiers of science fiction: the McDonalds sci-fi like Star Trek, where they have an adventure and solve it before the last commercial, and there are books that once you've read, you never look at the world the same way again.
Some people have a taboo about doing advertising in the States. You know, where they kind of make their bread and butter. But to me, that's crazy.
To be in the privileged position where I am able to give something back is, for me, perhaps the single most important measure of success.
There are certain things that can be asked that get me excited. It's never a thing where I think I'm too good, I'm just the type of person who likes to be enlightened. I don't like to go through the motions.
I made my money with software - encoded knowledge without which few products and services can exist today - and so it seemed imperative that this would be the field where I would give something back.
I love horror. I love 'The Shining,' 'Friday the 13th,' 'Halloween,' all those kinds of things. I love zombies, especially '28 Days Later' and '28 Weeks Later,' where the zombies are going faster than the George Romero ones. I love being scared; there's something that's awesome about your heart rate going up like that.
I think you've got to understand your character and where they're coming from.
We don't design by calculator or by demographics or anything like that. We really are a group of creative, sensitive people. We have our charmed little world where we get to make things. We're really lucky.
We've gone from, in the '50s and '60s, being very optimistic about the future, where the future is all spaceships and The Jetsons and flying cars, to where we were just sure the future was going to be a massive pile of rubble.
Anybody can have a birthday. It requires nothing. Murderers have birthdays. It's the opposite of anything that I believe in. And I don't like at work where you stop everything to sing 'Happy Birthday' to someone. I feel like that's for children.
I've definitely gone through phases where I'm not happy with my life, and you notice in little ways until they start adding up.
In a way, Strandbeests have turned into migration animals, and the step counter gives them an idea of where they are. While counting their steps, they know more or less where they are between Kijkduin and Scheveningen.
