Rugby gave me a confidence. I was quite shy and relatively timid, but it gave me the confidence to be a little bit more out-going and back myself a bit more.
Underperforming hospitals or units should accept that they have to improve the service they offer or that patients, quite properly, will go elsewhere.
I was 15 or 16 when I first saw 'Once Upon A Time In America,' so I was quite young, but I was completely blown away.
The truth is that my grandfather was quite wealthy, a shipbuilder.
I think it is not easy to impress a girl, especially with the looks that I have. It is quite tough.
I think my first story sold for $550. This was in 1954, and it seemed like quite a lot of money, and I said to myself, 'Hey, I'm a professional writer now.'
It is one thing to say that there is a constitutional right to keep a gun at home for protection. It is quite another to say there is a constitutional right to bring a hidden gun into a daycare center.
I was lucky to develop in the U.K. because I find comedy - in addition to being caustic - it's quite literary over here, and alternative comedy isn't so alternative.
Boys are quite often whimsical. Whereas girls are modest by nature and know their responsibilities very well. Their weapons are service, sacrifice, and love, by which they conquer over the males.
New York's home. It's everything I'd want it to be. It's the most inspiring city I've ever been to, and I haven't been everywhere in the world, but I've been to quite a few places.
I seem to be quite drawn to the medieval, magical fantasies, as it were.
I'm often accused of saying some pretty rotten things about my mother-in-law. But quite honestly, she's only got one major fault - it's called breathing.
I love rare books. Not that I own a lot of them, mind you. You couldn't quite call me a rare-book collector. But I did once work in a rare-books library, and I wrote a novel about a rare book.
Quite a few books about decluttering are published in a year.
Ayman Zawahiri, Osama bin Laden's deputy, as well as Abu Musab Zarqawi, have made it quite clear in their internal propaganda that they cannot win unless they can drive the Americans out. And they know that they can't do that there, so they've brought the battlefield to the halls of Congress.
Our live set's become increasingly complex recently; we've been doing stuff that's been vastly too much information for most people to deal with and I think it's quite interesting watching how people behave in those situations, under those circumstances.
I was a bit of a handful when I was a kid because I was quite hyperactive. Even in the house my mum used to put me in my pram because I was so full-on.
Quite often, I'll be sent a script for a movie. And I find that I like it, so I say I'll do it. But then they rewrite it for me. They make it quirky. Odd. I find that rather annoying. I call it Walkenising.
When writing about historical characters I try to be as accurate as possible, and in particular not to misrepresent the view they held. With a real historical figure you have to be fair, and this is not an obligation you have in dealing with your own creations, so it is quite different.
I was always fascinated by politics, and I was exposed to it quite a lot.
But as a young kid, I never did, really have an ambition to be a farmer. I never thought, gee, I would like to farm, and I want to raise these crops. I didn't quite know what I wanted to do.
Although I grew up in London, I spent summers in Missouri, where my dad lived. It's quite a liberal town, Kansas City. You'd be surprised.
Being a Scotsman, I wear a skirt quite a lot, but we're allowed. I have an incredibly loud Hawaiian shirt that's pink and a particularly disgusting turquoise, but I just wear it on days when I'm in a strange mood.
I'd always had quite a privileged lifestyle, to be honest. I've never wanted for anything, but I do know the value of things. I'm not, like, a brat.
The dynamic between two individuals starts off with everything warm and nice and fabulous and good. Working and living together can serve you quite well, but when it starts to go wrong - oh, boy!
The Nobel Prize has been a disturbance at the beginning of October for some years. It would be gratifying to win, but it would be quite an ordeal, too, with all the events which go on for two days. I'd think carefully about what I was doing the day it is announced and maybe not be around, or be around, but elsewhere.
Everyone's talking about how no one is buying records any more, but to me it's quite logical. In the 1990s, music was so hardcore-marketed to a certain group of people that I think a lot of kids felt taken advantage of.
I happen to be interested in watching a face age. I like faces of women aging so it makes me personally quite sad. That's a beautiful gift from God. If people don't want to see that anymore then I won't be in anymore movies.
We have a lot of customers in Japan, but they don't quite get the local content that they always need, so we want to encourage all of our product teams to start thinking globally.
I think that Americans find the Australian humour and the energy of Australians very refreshing - we are quite self-deprecating, we're light-hearted and can have a laugh.
Traveling the road can be quite tiresome.
I speak English with my dad and Swedish with my mom; it's quite schizophrenic.
I used to play quite a good lead guitar, R&B style. Clapton and BB King are heroes.
The violent quarrel between the abstractionists and the surrealists seems to me quite unnecessary. All good art has contained both abstract and surrealist elements, just as it has contained both classical and romantic elements - order and surprise, intellect and imagination, conscious and unconscious.
A few people have tried to make me see that my writing isn't quite their thing by saying to me: 'What about realism?' To which my general response is, 'What about it?' However, I wouldn't be at all surprised if one of my favorite writers, Marilynne Robinson, was to say something similar if asked 'What about the fantastic?'
When you start to live your dream, it's not quite what you thought it was because there is a lot of overwhelming stuff that comes on top of it, and you have to figure it all out.
