When I was trying to write a novel, I ran out of money, and I was delivering packages on a bicycle. And I finally connected with these guys who started a software company, and almost serendipitously fell into that. I felt like they were goofy guys and that I was a goofy guy.
There’s a tremendous amount of work building the apparatus, getting the experiment to work. But sitting there late at night in the lab, and knowing light is going at bicycle speed, and that nobody in the history of mankind has ever been here before – that is mind-boggling. It’s worth everything.
I’ve never been particularly aware of my age. It’s like being on a bicycle – I just put my foot down and keep going.
When I was young, I used to expect Parisians to wear little black berets, to bicycle about with strings of onions around their necks, and to brandish long sticks of bread, just like they used to do in school textbooks.
People always ask me, ‘I don’t know how you could watch that, how that affects you,’ and I just tell them, ‘I went through it in real life, so it’s like pilots watching a ‘Top Gun’ movie or cyclists watching a bicycle movie,’ something like that.
I want to take time for myself, because all my life is ta-ta-ta-ta. So I don’t want nothing special, just to breathe. I’d like to work maybe a half day and then take my bicycle and go by the riverside.
I get up just before six and come downstairs, put food out for the cats, and open the cat flap. Then I work out for 35 or 40 minutes – I have a very large bathroom with an elliptical cross-trainer and a bicycle.
Susan B. Anthony said that the bicycle did more to emancipate women than any other single thing. The bicycle was linked in the psyches of women at that time as a symbol of practical emancipation. Women could go places, wear their skirts shorter to manage the bicycle, and be independent.
Teenage girls in television and film, in my experience, oftentimes are portrayed as either the sweet, innocent virgin or the super-sexy, experienced, town bicycle. There never seems to be an in-between. I think most girls are somewhere in between those two tropes.
The bicycle kick is not easy to do.
I have no driver’s license, so I ride a bicycle beside the Han River. That’s what I really love because no one gives a damn about me for that moment. I feel so free.
Urban planning and design are helping us to shift from a car-centric system to a bike-centric one by making bicycles and bicycle infrastructure superior in functionality and attractiveness.
My main form of transportation at that time was a bicycle, because bicycles could move though the crowd.
My father got a phone call to bring me in to meet with Spielberg for ‘E.T.,’ partially because they knew I was a physical kid, and I was known in the business somewhat as a stunt kid, and I could do all the bicycle riding.
About 25 years ago, I took a bicycle across the United States. I soon found out that the greatest item of clothing was the trusty bandanna. There were dozens of uses for a bandanna – as a pot holder, a chain cleaner, a sun shield, a headband, a snot rag, a declaration of Kerouacian intent.
I think I’ve had some of my better ideas on a bicycle.
If you’re looking for a behind-the-scenes rock-n-roll biography, pick up Nikki Sixx’s ‘The Heroin Diaries’. If you want the world’s most narcissistic high school yearbook, however, ‘First Step 2 Forever’ is your new bicycle.
Every day since the start of the Tour de France, the popular ‘Le Parisien’ newspaper has published a story about a book written with the bicycle in mind.
If I don’t write down a thought – or an image or a line of poetry – the instant it comes to mind, it vanishes, which explains why I have pens and notebooks in my pants and coat pockets, the car, the bicycle basket, on one or two desks in every room including bathrooms and the kitchen.
Marriage is a wonderful invention: then again, so is a bicycle repair kit.
In 1941 I finished at Allison Intermediate School (grades 7-9), and started at North High School, commuting by bicycle about 5 miles from home to school.
I grew up north of Chicago, not far from where the Schwinn bicycle plant used to be, and was conscious of the fact that these beautiful, everlasting bikes were made just down the road.
Every time I see an adult on a bicycle, I no longer despair for the future of the human race.
My father had Parkinson’s, though he actually died following a bicycle accident.
John Kerry had a very vivid imagination as a young person. I mean, he actually did go and take his bicycle from Norway to go camp in Sherwood Forest to be around the ghost of Robin Hood.
I must have made 20 different bicycles in my life; bicycle parts are like works of art in miniature.
I had a normal life; we didn’t meet movie stars. We lived in Texas where you had rollerskates, and if you got a bicycle, that was a very big gift.
To learn to ride a bicycle, as with the other great noble human inventions, is a hugely complex activity. Generally, it requires three things: the learner, the teacher and the bicycle, all in the same place at the same time, most often outside someplace.
In the 9th grade I began my first wage work for the West Side Drug store delivering prescriptions and sundries on my bicycle to customers who called in orders.
It’s almost embarrassing, but I do have one trick for taking portraits on commission. I carry one of these little bicycle horns in my pocket, and once in a while, when someone is sour-faced or stiff, I blow my horn. It sort of shatters the barriers. It’s silly, but it works.
I do not own a car, and my main form of travel to Westminster and in my constituency is by bicycle. I also take my bike on trains to meetings in other parts of the country, which enables me to see other cities and the other parts of the country.
Toleration is the greatest gift of the mind; it requires the same effort of the brain that it takes to balance oneself on a bicycle.
I never learned to ride a bicycle, and it is too late now. I never learned to drive. I never learned to swim.
I ride a bicycle. I make artwork and do other kinds of stuff – but in terms of unwind, I like to play tennis and ride.
When I was a kid, we played outside until we couldn’t see and had to go in. I rode my bicycle and played tag football, kick the can, and hide-and-go-seek.
When I was a kid I used to pray every night for a new bicycle. Then I realised that the Lord doesn’t work that way so I stole one and asked Him to forgive me.
Bike lanes are the coolest. My favorite past time is flipping off cars from my bicycle. Just kidding – I’m more of a silent resentment kind of girl.
The bicycle is a former child’s toy that has now been elevated to icon status because, presumably, it can move the human form from pillar to post without damage to the environment.
That was in the days when everyone rode a bicycle, and the journal had a circulation of over one hundred and twenty-five thousand weekly, so my verses and illustrations became known to a fairly large public.
The bicycle might just be the greatest of all inventions. It empowers the human machine, and with no input beyond perhaps a trendy isotonic health drink in a brightly coloured bottle at an inflated price.
I made an urban-looking bicycle that could stand up to potholes. Of course, it was stolen instantly – proof of the genius of its design.
Happiness is actually found in simple things, such as taking my nephew around the island by bicycle or seeing the stars at night. We go to coffee shops or see airplanes land at the airport.
When I was in New York, I took my bike everywhere for transportation. I didn’t have a fixed-gear bicycle, like a lot of the messengers do, but I had a stripped-down deal – having lost a few good ones in New York – and I did 10 to 15 miles a day just getting around the city.
All I’ve ever ended up with in terms of achievements is the movie, some really stupid anecdotes, a bunch of crosswords that I didn’t finish and maybe some old bicycle that I found lying around on set.
To these ideals which were instilled in me when I was a youth, I attribute in a large degree the success that was mine on the bicycle tracks of the world.
If I’m in the English countryside and get on my bicycle, I see what sort of strange inbred rural locals I can snap.
Pages: 1 2
