Some people have human muses – mine is a city. I feel a startling ambivalence towards London, but for better or worse my work has come utterly to depend upon it.
In the world at large, people are rewarded or punished in ways that are often utterly random. In the garden, cause and effect, labor and reward, are re-coupled. Gardening makes sense in a senseless world. By extension, then, the more gardens in the world, the more justice, the more sense is created.
Some economists seem to think that only a credentialed economist has the right to be utterly wrong about an issue of economics. Their contempt for amateurs – columnists with broad audiences, for example – would sear the lungs if inhaled.
If everything in the environment is utterly predictable, you become bored. If it’s utterly unpredictable, you become frustrated.
I find ‘EastEnders’ so utterly bleak.
Warfare is an utterly stupid method of settling differences of interest between different nations.
Do not grieve yourself too much for those you hate, nor yet forget them utterly.
The Lord your God will raise up a Prophet like me from among your own people. Listen carefully to everything He tells you. Anyone who will not listen to that Prophet will be cut off from God’s people and utterly destroyed.
I’ve had it with those women – women! – who seek to undermine the serious work of women in Israeli politics by describing them as ‘attractive and elegant’ but utterly vacant.
The market is incredibly inefficient and capable on rare occasions of being utterly dysfunctional. And people have a really hard time getting their brain around that fact. They want to believe that it’s approximately efficient almost all the time, and it simply isn’t true.
I am utterly struck how, 300 years after his execution, Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire.
When you act a scene with Sidney Poitier, he listens intently to every word you say. You can feel your words hit him. He makes the scene utterly real.
I just remember watching ‘Brass Eye’ and being so utterly blown away by the scope of it and how much it managed to cram into an episode.
My characters are always utterly sympathetic to me, if that makes any sense.
You don’t sit up in a cave and write the Great American Novel and know it is utterly superb, and then throw it page by page into the fire. You just don’t do that. You send it out. You have to send it out.
I’ll often get obsessed with something for about three days, and I’ll be utterly into it, and I’ll read every single thing about it possible. And then three days later, I’ll just forget about it, and I’ll be onto something else.
Kunta Kinte is NOT an American, and he utterly rejects that idea at every turn.
Once, and only once, I walked on stage and my mind went utterly blank! I had no idea why I was there! My fellow actors had to rescue me. I was very young and new to the business, so I’m glad it didn’t give me stage fright for the rest of my life!
Obviously, the institution of marriage in America has utterly collapsed.
What comes with a job as a staff member of the BBC is a certain self-censoring that you get utterly used to. You don’t say everything you think. You hold back on some things.
I drove around in a Volkswagen Rabbit I shared with one of my roommates, and it didn’t have a roof. It doesn’t rain much in L.A., but when it did, it was utterly miserable.
What should we suppose must naturally be the consequence of our carrying on a slave trade with Africa? With a country, vast in its extent, not utterly barbarous, but civilized in a very small degree? Does any one suppose a slave trade would help their civilization?
John McCain is simply a man of considerable character, poor guy. He is utterly bereft of cultural cachet.
I saw the first ‘How to Train Your Dragon’ film with my children, and I found it utterly exhilarating.
The priest is Christ’s slave, and Christ himself took the form of a slave and became obedient to death. So the priest in serving human needs lives a Godward life, possessed by God and witnessing that only when lives are utterly possessed by God do they find their true freedom.
It’s one thing to fail with something you utterly believe in, but to fail with something you don’t believe in? You just feel so sordid.
I have a large collection of town cars because when I was just a snipe in the gutter, growing up in Los Angeles, a town car drove by. I remember running in the house to get my mother so she could see it. It was utterly magnificent.
I am completely, utterly obsessed with clothes. To an embarrassing extent.
My notion of the KGB came from romantic spy stories. I was a pure and utterly successful product of Soviet patriotic education.
As we began to read more and more journals of men who had been in the Civil War and then been in the Indian Wars, we realized there was a whole universe of men whose souls had been shattered, whose lives had been utterly destroyed by what they had to do.
I believe art is utterly important. It is one of the things that could save us.
Every time we meet a new terrorist group, we argue they are utterly different and we can learn nothing from the last time. Of course they are different, but some lessons on how we deal with them seem to apply in all cases.
Show me the artist anywhere who’s had an utterly stable mental life, and I’ll buy you hot dinners for the rest of your life.
I utterly respect that there are lots of people who do service jobs and deserve our respect, because they make our world function.
We throw all our attention on the utterly idle question whether A has done as well as B, when the only question is whether A has done as well as he could.
Whilst shame keeps its watch, virtue is not wholly extinguished in the heart; nor will moderation be utterly exiled from the minds of tyrants.
My favorite part of the whole filmmaking process is working with a fantastic cinematographer, a fantastic actor or actors, and then just creating emotions and stories. I get so excited by that. That’s the part I’m utterly addicted to.
I was, without a sliver of a doubt, a no-good, lazy slacker of a child, and after I discovered literature, I was totally and utterly a no-good, lazy slacker of a child who read books. A lot of books, good and bad, but my favourite – the books I read and reread in my teens – were by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman.
Producing is a world of compromise and actors are utterly spoiled all the time.
A novel is utterly your own creation, a very private process. I think of a novel as a noun and a screenplay as a verb. In a novel, very little needs to happen; you can explore a person’s memories and thoughts and fantasies. In a screenplay, it’s all action; you must push the story on.
Like many alcoholics, I was a staggering woman in a chic apartment, sick and utterly disgusting.
I was on a very bumpy plane ride, an overnight flight. I was so miserable, and I pulled out ‘David Copperfield,’ and I forgot how scared and tired I was, and I thought, ‘This is what reading should be.’ I’m utterly transported out of my current situation.
I am delighted that young filmmakers want me in their films. They have open minds and a fresh take on old attitudes. I derive a lot of energy from them. Most of all, I find their love and respect utterly disarming.
I am completely and utterly hooked to all the great shows on A&E and Court TV that are about small town murder.
‘O Brother, Where Art Thou?’ was this role that utterly fell into my lap and changed my life.
Growing up in Singapore, I wasn’t allowed to visit China. So when I was finally able to go there after the country began opening up to tourism in the 1990s, I found it to be utterly astounding.
It is utterly asinine that people continually go to comedy shows without bothering to see if their sensibilities line up with the comedians.
I’m obsessed with Kate Middleton. Obsessed. I loved the Royal Wedding. I was so cynical going into it, and pseudo-political about the whole thing, but as soon as I saw her, I was utterly charmed. I’m just completely enchanted by Kate and William.
All science requires mathematics. The knowledge of mathematical things is almost innate in us. This is the easiest of sciences, a fact which is obvious in that no one’s brain rejects it; for laymen and people who are utterly illiterate know how to count and reckon.
I probably have fundamentally antisocial tendencies. I never took one extracurricular activity. I just failed utterly at that level. Part of me still rebels against that.
As you get older and wiser you realize that when people are given anything without having to earn it (unless they are physically or mentally utterly incapable of earning anything), they become ungrateful and lazy. They also become less happy.
I completely think of myself as sexual. Completely and utterly. Probably more so than I did when I was 30. I don’t know why. I’m very comfortable with how I look. I’m absolutely committed to never having anything done to my face. I would never let anyone near me with a Botox needle.
I utterly reject the view that the Third World is doomed to poverty and starvation. Not only is this wrong, I think this attitude verges on the immoral, like thinking that slavery is an unalterable facet of the human condition so why bother doing anything about it?
