In London the day after Christmas (Boxing Day), it began to snow: my first snow in England. For five years, I had been tactfully asking, 'Do you ever have snow at all?' as I steeled myself to the six months of wet, tepid gray that make up an English winter. 'Ooo, I do remember snow,' was the usual reply, 'when I were a lad.'
Among the New Hollanders whom we were thus engaged with, there was one who by his appearance and carriage, as well in the morning as this afternoon, seemed to be the chief of them, and a kind of prince or captain among them.
Being a nocturnal creature myself, I often find myself in dark alleys or strange places late at night. If there were werewolves around, I'd be likely to run into them, being the night owl that I am.
When my children were young, one of the treats promised by their grandparents was a ride in Grandad's car.
I went through a big Kurt Vonnegut phase. But the writers who made me decide at a very early age that this is probably something I wanted to do were Stephen King and Douglas Adams, when I was probably, like, ten years old.
I was taught by professors who had done their schooling in the 1930s. Most of them were scornful of, even hated, big business.
The senior officer who met with reporters in Baghdad said there had been 21 car bombings in the capital in May, and 126 in the past 80 days. All last year, he said, there were only about 25 car bombings in Baghdad.
It seemed to me... that the only valid people to deal with crime were cops, and I would like to make the lead character, rather than a single person, a squad of cops.
Deprivation is for me what daffodils were for Wordsworth.
Here were these college kids beating the Soviets and going on to the Olympic Gold Medal. To me, that's the greatest upset of all time in any sport that I can think of.
Could I have worked under a system where there were Draconian controls on my creativity, meaning budget, time, script choices, etc.? Definitely not. I would have fared poorly under the old studio system that guys like Howard Hawks did so well in. I cannot.
My dad served in the Air Force as ground crew for several years, and doesn't really talk about it. I know that it's there. I think my main thing about direct or indirect experiences as near to home as it were is the idea of self-sacrifice really.
I chose to not wear a wire and tape people. I chose to not get immunity until - were accepted, whatever - until the independent counsel's office was comfortable with what I said was the truth.
Sometimes my biography is interpreted as the upbringing of a French aristocrat. It was very, very different. We were a family of mercantile, immigrant Jews.
I started in '69 to have psychoanalysis, and I realised very soon that I was changing, and that's I think why my movies were changing. They became much more open to dialogue.
You have to remember when we were going once a month, we were putting out issues that were 480 pages, and people were complaining that these were too big, I can't get through a 480 page magazine every month.
If I were to agree to write the music for your beautiful poem, it would tie your poem up for some years as I have agreements and obligations which I must respect.
The kids get cheated out of a lot of times with their dad. They were good about it.
It were not best that we should all think alike; it is difference of opinion that makes horse races.
There would be no supporting life were we to feel quite as poignantly for others as we do for ourselves.
The English scene got more media attention with their emphasis on fashion, with the safety pins and all. There were some really good bands over there. The Sex Pistols were great.
Only the winners decide what were war crimes.
I was going to be a concert pianist, and when I was in high school, my parents were scared to death that I would focus too much on that too soon. And that I'd end up in some sort of dead end, and not fulfilling whatever potential they thought I had.
I think then, when we started receiving the first of the user feedback, feedback from people that I had not specifically told about it, but had spread from friend to friend and then they were giving us feedback.
Back in college, I remember shooting stupid videos with my friends. It would be us going around town in capes pretending we were superheroes.
Sometimes I think opposable thumbs were invented so teenage girls could use text messaging.
We knew we were talking about spies. I knew he knew I knew. I was digging my own grave.
I knew some people at my school who were squatters, and my younger brother was a squatter. I knew those guys: those were the people who said the Russians were the good guys and the Americans were bad. But I was the guy who went to the disco.
Sometimes a technology is so awe-inspiring that the imagination runs away with it - often far, far away from reality. Robots are like that. A lot of big and ultimately unfulfilled promises were made in robotics early on, based on preliminary successes.
My parents managed a summer camp, and it was vacant for about seven or eight months out of the year. It was in the middle of nowhere in the woods. We backed up to a state forest. So absolutely, there were creepy woods all around the house. It was easy to get lost. It was really spooky.
Especially when I first really started to work with Kenneth and Franklin, who had been in space already. And so, they were able to talk about space and tell me a few things about how things would really happen.
Oprah was not somebody who was telling us what to do, she wasn't really teaching us like so many people we see today. With Oprah, she was learning and we were learning with her. And I think that's really was the seed that was planted for all of us to just hang in there with her.
When I was growing up, I played a lot of ten- and 12-over games, and I would bat in the middle order. I got only ten-odd balls to face, and I tried to score as much as I could. I applied the same approach in domestic and international cricket, and people were appreciating my strike rate being more than 80 or 90 in Test cricket.
There's always pressure, a great deal of pressure, when writing, since my first books were so successful.
At a magazine, everything you do is edited by a bunch of people, by committee, and a lot of them are, were, or think of themselves as writers. Part of that is because magazines worry about their voice.
As a student, I was a total jhalli who used to wear torn denims, faded kurtis, kohled eyes and thought that I was the coolest girl ever! We were a bunch of students who used to do social-issue-based street plays and believed that we could bring about a change in the world.
