Let me start by saying I wish no country had the need for an army. But in Israel, serving is part of being an Israeli. You've got to give back to the state. You give two or three years, and it's not about you. You give your freedom away. You learn discipline and respect.
One of the things I'm most proud of about my country is the fact that we did lick McCarthyism back in the fifties.
I was very much into buying contemporary art, but I've just decided I want to get rid of it all. Not that it's not great art, but all of a sudden my mood has changed, and I want to go back to seventeenth- and eighteenth-century masters.
Kauai is kind of my place where I go to get centered. It's always my place to come back and feel normal again.
College ain't so much where you been as how you talk when you get back.
Understanding the intentions of a play is so key because you can block a guy into the running back if you don't know how the play is supposed to work or where the back is going to come out.
Small businesses are the backbone of job creation in South Carolina, but we're not maximizing our potential when we've got what's effectively the highest income tax rate in the Southeast holding us back.
I like working intensely, then going away and thinking about it, working out why it didn't work and then coming back to it. It makes the work richer, I think.
I get up about four times a night and go back to sleep, or not. Then I swill tea around 8 a.m. I answer e-mail, while I stall thinking about whatever scares me.
We are a long way from getting back the jobs lost since President Bush took office.
All my life, all my life that I can, as far back as I can remember, I saw my first movie when I was six years old. And since then I wanted to do that. I wanted to be a part of that.
Blaming speculators as a response to financial crisis goes back at least to the Greeks. It's almost always the wrong response.
There's a fun, nostalgic aspect to Legos - people connect to the art on a different level. But it's also a medium that lets me design anything I can imagine. I especially enjoy creating curvy forms using rectangular pieces. Up close, you notice the sharp angles, but when you back away, the corners blend into curves.
I remember a song I did called 'If the Good Die Young' - I wanted to have a lead guitar solo on there, and the label flipped out! It was too rock and roll. They made us go back and put fiddle on the solo.
It's just a great, legendary comic book hero and it's one that has never been kind of been brought back to life after Lynda Carter. I mean, it's a reinvention. When Tim Burton reinvented Batman after Adam West, and when Donner reinvented Superman after George Reeves, it's time to do that with Wonder Woman.
I remember so vividly playing a scene with Jimmy Stewart. I was in the back of a covered wagon, and we were doing this little talk in the wilderness. They did his close-up first. I was looking at him and thinking, 'How does he do that?' He is not 'doing' anything, and yet everything is there.
The president's grand experiment in trickle-down government has held back rather than sped economic recovery. He seems to sincerely believe we can build a middle class out of government jobs paid for with borrowed dollars.
Almost everything has been stolen from us by the patriarchy. Our creativity has been stolen, our creative energies, our religion. I want it back.
When I was on Broadway when I was little, I remember always driving through Times Square with my dad to the theater. Now when I go back, you can't even drive on Broadway in the 40s. New Times Square is too touristy to me.
I do go back to Russia frequently, about twice a year. I hate the flight, but it's worth it. My parents have a home in a little village of 12 houses. It's not on any map, so unless you know it's there, you won't find it. Nothing works there; no Internet, no cell phone, and the land line only works sometimes. It's great!
The repressed memory is like a noisy intruder being thrown out of the concert hall. You can throw him out, but he will bang on the door and continue to disturb the concert. The analyst opens the door and says, If you promise to behave yourself, you can come back in.
I did 'Love Letter' and 'Write Me Back,' and those were fun albums for me to do because they took me back to music I love.
There ought to be more grants that go to people in their late twenties and early thirties. That's a crucial age, although it's very hard to judge who is worth supporting and who is not. Looking back on my own life, I see that was the period when I was closest to giving up as a novelist and when I most needed some encouragement.
Youth is an amazing thing: I think back on when we did The Lost Boys, and I didn't think I could do anything wrong.
Trying to give back a little bit is important.
At one time, when I was eight years old, my mother and father, my brother and my sisters - we had to move back in with my grandmother, and there were 13 of us living in one house.
I'll eventually go back to theater because the feeling of being on stage where you have the audience right there, you can't replace that with anything.
I hope to actually get back to painting someday... soon. I sort of transitioned into cartooning from painting.
You feel completely in control when you hear a wave of laughter coming back at you that you have caused.
I would never write realistic prose. I don't like people who try to write in a poetic style, but in the course of their book abandon it for realism, and weave back and forth like drunkards between the surreal and the real.
Why would we want to keep a tax cut that's failed? Why would we not want to go back to the Clinton tax code? And why would we not want to help every family more with a health-care plan like mine? Let's help average people. Let's be Democrats.
I know that my tendency is to be linear, and I'm trying to find ways to subvert that. And so in 'Bellocq's Ophelia' my device for subverting it was to tell the story and then to tell it again; it always circles back to this one moment, and it's not linear, but it's round in that way, and much of 'Native Guard' is like that.
Great law schools like Northwestern are here to expand the minds of their students, to allow them to achieve their personal goals, to enable them to contribute, to give back in ways that they could not without the education they receive here, and to help them make the greatest country in the world just a little more accessible, a little fairer.
Dealing with backstabbers, there was one thing I learned. They're only powerful when you got your back turned.
In terms of the idea of long-term occupation - I have been reading a little bit more about this period - and you can see in that occupation are many lessons for the current occupation of Iraq. So we have these connections that go way back that people aren't aware of.
I throw the ball ninety-two miles an hour, but they hit it back just as hard.
