I remember once Manchester United were ahead of Manchester City by eight points and ended up losing it, so everything is possible in this life.
If you go back to the 17th century, scientists generally weren't rewarded much at all for sharing discoveries, and as a result, they conducted a lot of their research very, very secretively indeed.
I grew up in Manchester, and we were very poor. My father was a miner who joined the Navy during the war and developed a lung disease and had to have a lung removed.
At that moment of realization I knew that I had been blind because I had wished not to see; it was only then that I realised, at last, that all these dead men, French and Germans, were brothers, and I was the brother of them all.
There were no spells at my school, just a smack in the mouth.
The government of India is consistently very advanced. When the world was hesitant on UNIX, we were the first to move in; the RBI said that all banks will implement on UNIX. It worked!
My first novel is loaded with food references largely because my cupboards were bare, and I was writing hungry.
This house I grew up in was built in the 1800s, and the back yard was like a cemetery. Naturally, I grew up in an environment where ghosts and supernatural things were very unnerving to me, because my brothers and I dealt with it on a daily basis.
This kind of music was just hitting England, so we were getting this following in clubs in Birmingham just cause we were trying to do something different.
I always think about the settlers who moved to New Zealand in the 1800s. They hadn't even been to the place before. They just packed their bags and shipped over knowing they'd never see their family again or be able to speak to them - they'd maybe get a letter if they were lucky.
We were an entertainment brand, and if we were going to compete in an era of incredible growth in the cable industry, I felt we actually needed to be entertaining.
The birds never needed passports... We always thought, the birds can go wherever they want, and we couldn't, really. The birds were very much the symbol of... free movement for me.
I've always found a cure for the blues is wandering into something unknown, and resting there, before coming back to whatever weight you were carrying.
I was 16 before I met another passionate collector. One summer, I visited England; a new friend took me calling on his dotty, brilliant old aunt. She occupied a quaint house in Kent. Its walls were lined with glass-fronted cases full of what? Ancient shoe buckles.
In communism, we never had any freedom - of movement, of speech, of press. We didn't even make own decisions for our lives, our future. We were human robots.
In any given project, there are a few moments where there is the usual disappointment, as it were, when you look in the mirror, and you realize you're not 23 and looking like Brad Pitt.
If you were to do it again, you'd probably do some things differently. But the decision is right to have a single entity manage the water and the waste water for a country.
One of the things I did in my book, I start off with, is explaining how great our grace was: the things we were able to accomplish after the first one-hundred years from slavery.
There were no jobs created in America from 1945, when the war ended, through 2003. How could there be? Taxes were too high. Preposterously so under Eisenhower, Kennedy, Nixon, Reagan (who left office with a 28 percent rate on long-term capital gains) and Bush the Elder.
Because I grew up on 'Star Wars', that was the best example of creating a full and rich world to me as a writer. When I was watching those movies as a kid, I wanted to know more about every damn character in that universe. There was always a hint that there was a story there that you just weren't getting to see.
The concern was that if a woman was doing gender equality, her chances of making it to tenure in the law school were diminished. It was considered frivolous.
If you'd come to me in 2012, when the last presidential election was raging and we were cooking up ever more complicated ways to monetize Facebook data, and told me that Russian agents in the Kremlin's employ would be buying Facebook ads to subvert American democracy, I'd have asked where your tin-foil hat was.
I personally made lots of mistakes during my 10-12 years as a newspaper editor. Some of which I felt were big mistakes I have tried to address.
The only real experiences I've had with therapists were the ones who were working with me and my family when my mother was ill.
Modern Architecture died in St. Louis, Missouri, on July 15, 1972, at 3.32 p.m. (or thereabouts), when the infamous Pruitt Igoe scheme, or rather several of its slab blocks, were given the final coup de grace by dynamite.
When my children were born, I made the choice I wanted them to be raised as Jews and to have a Jewish education.
That was mandatory in the contract with Aaron Spelling, that if you were contracted to do one of his shows, you had to do any other shows that were his.
If you think about it, all of us have one or more teachers who were instrumental.
The hardcore fanbase of nerds that live on the Internet are not nearly as powerful as I thought they were. They really, really aren't. They also flip-flop like mad.
When I started writing about art, there were no curators.
The truth is, we were sick of, every time we finished a movie, having to start all over again from nothing, going to a studio, pitching an idea, setting up a new office.
I have three brothers and one sister, and I'm the third child. Sometimes people say, 'It's only natural you would become a writer - your parents were English professors.' But my four siblings were brought up in the exact same household, and no one else became a writer or an English professor.
Since 9/11, some of the most violent terrorists we've encountered were radicalized or recruited at universities.
David Lee Roth had the idea that if you covered a successful song, you were half way home. C'mon - Van Halen doing 'Dancing in the Streets'? It was stupid. I started feeling like I would rather bomb playing my own songs than be successful playing someone else's music.
I was inspired by all of it. 'The Avengers,' 'Harry Palmer,' 'The Prisoner,' 'The Man from UNCLE,' 'In Like Flint.' Of course, there's a huge shadow of Bond - Bond is the monolith of spy movies - but it's not just about Bond; there were a lot of other things that influenced me.
The people that have inspired me the most were dancers and choreographers. Even growing up, if I dealt with any pressure to be a certain way, I knew that as an artistic lane, dancing was the one that was a little more freed up - like, no one in my family is really doing that; I can be that person.
