There is no instance of a nation benefitting from prolonged warfare.
Children’s games constitute the most admirable social institutions. The game of marbles, for instance, as played by boys, contains an extremely complex system of rules – that is to say, a code of laws, a jurisprudence of its own.
Just as we have had great working lives, we have also had good personal lives. For instance, we have made school our number one priority. We have been in school our entire lives with kids our own age. We guess that’s pretty regular.
I sometimes don’t try to invent something. I wait for some kind of a direction – and it happens. I get an angle, for instance, and it just appears, and I say, ‘Oh my God – that’s it!’
I felt slightly superior to student politics, for instance. I had no reason to think this, but I thought of myself as slightly more seasoned. I became quite cynical talking to my student friends.
If you play a part that’s been done before, on stage for instance, you feel like you’re carrying a torch and staggering under the weight of it for a bit and then passing it on to somebody else.
Any change in my style depends on many things, but it’s whatever fits the project. It’s important to me to make style changes from time to time; it makes me feel alive as an artist. For instance, with ‘Moonshine,’ I’m doing all my own coloring. That’s a new development!
If you don’t treat an ingredient and its flavors with respect – if you drown it in oil, for instance – you’ll spoil it.
A mixer for me needs to have some sort of effects, as it’s a big part of how I might hype up the crowd in certain parts of a track, using the delays and filters for instance.
Metaphorical tone deafness is when people are unable to discern what is of value in something. I think I’m tone deaf to poetry, for instance. Despite having studied it into a second year of university, most of it just leaves me cold.
You can’t learn to write in college. It’s a very bad place for writers because the teachers always think they know more than you do – and they don’t. They have prejudices. They may like Henry James, but what if you don’t want to write like Henry James? They may like John Irving, for instance, who’s the bore of all time.
You can learn many things from children. How much patience you have, for instance.
All nations struggle in the aftermath of civil war. More than 100 years after the English Civil War, for instance, any prelate who was ‘enthusiastic’ about religion attracted censure and suspicion.
For instance, we’re always fighting amongst each other. Who gives us the arms? And then we become indebted to wherever we are buying them from – with what? The very resources we need to keep there.
I’d rather deal with a big company, because at least I can sue them, and see them, and know what they’re doing. Google, for instance, shows you everything they’ve collected on you, with a clearly written privacy policy. They tell you what they’re doing with it. I’m not scared by that.
Thank God for the Internet. Thank God for these amazing portals that are there. For instance, Netflix and Amazon. The kind of content the audience has got to see has gone up drastically, and because of this, the quality of work will go up, too.
What makes a star or a movie into a legend? I don’t know. For instance, when Robert Taylor and I made ‘Party Girl’ in 1958, nobody was particularly excited about it. Now, it’s considered by thousands to be a classic. There are ‘Party Girl’ cults.
For instance, I’m always fascinated to see whether, given the kind of fairly known and established form called popular music, whether there is some magic combination that nobody has hit upon before.
Certain formats should never be forgotten, ‘Blind Date’ for instance, because ‘Britain’s Got Talent’ is really ‘New Faces’ or ‘The Gong Show,’ whilst we’re basically ‘Opportunity Knocks.’
I can’t know entirely what’s at stake beforehand; you find out as you go. I love to take a poem, for instance, that starts with something seemingly frivolous or inconsequential and then grows in gravity until by the end it’s something very serious.
I can play in any position in the attacking zone, but I don’t like to stick to the wing, for instance. I need to have freedom to move throughout the attacking and creative zone.
I always felt that I was born in the wrong era. I wanted to be friends with John Garfield, for instance.
We need to keep examining evilness. For instance, I’m totally against the fact that Osama bin Laden was shot. I think that he should have been put on trial and exposed as that human being he was. I think he should’ve been standing mentally naked in front of the rest of us and stand to justice for what he did.
Thus, in general, in the first instance, the direction of interest in empirical fact will be canalised by the logical structure of the theoretical system.
I wouldn’t say I’m a very controlling person. For instance, when I talk to the actors, I don’t tell them exactly what I want because I want them to surprise me. I even encourage them to change some of the verses of the script if they need to.
In ‘Snow White and the Hunstman,’ when we see them in the Dark Forest, you’re allowed a lot of freedom to be able to cutaway to, for instance, the prince. That B and C story stuff helps the writing process, even though it makes it a more complicated movie.
We know that young babies, as they become capable of moving voluntarily, will share. They will share food, for instance, with their siblings and with kids that are around. They will sooth. If they see somebody else in pain, even the youngest of toddlers will try to reach out and pat the person.
But, for instance, when I was awfully young, I read all the Oz books. They were an enormous influence on me.
I try and speak out on things that affect where I live in London, and at home in Enniskillen. For instance, I am very keen we get our bypass – the town is completely clogged with traffic and it’s one of the most beautiful inland towns in Ireland.
But my estimates, for instance, based upon book information, were simply ridiculous, fanciful images of African attractions were soon dissipated, anticipated pleasures vanished, and all crude ideas began to resolve themselves into shape.
There’s a sort of magic and music to comedy. Some words, some numbers even, are funnier than others. A Caramac bar, for instance, is funnier than a Milky Way.
I think it’s important for people to believe their elections are on the up and up and they aren’t being tampered with by anyone, and in this particular instance there’s a large body of evidence that at a minimum Russia tried to tamper with our election.
I don’t think that every single case of sexual harassment has to result in someone being fired; the consequences should vary. But we need a shift in culture so that every single instance of sexual harassment is investigated and dealt with. That’s just basic common sense.
I was too shy, I think, to sing publicly. It takes a particular kind of person. And when I was young, I was not that person. In the first instance, when a record company said to me, do you want to try and make your record, my first reaction was, no, I’m not worthy – I couldn’t possibly, and so on and so forth.
There’s no question that I’ve made mistakes along the way when you look at recruiting in terms of evaluations of players or character in an instance or two.
I see myself as a social conservative, but I think that there are lots of social institutions that produce beneficial reforms, like public hospitals, for instance, and schools.
There is no essence, but there is a flux that is more real than any instance of the flux, such as a milk bottle or a tiger.
Salt Lake City gave me a lot of surprises. How progressive the city actually is, for instance, compared to the rest of Utah – it’s like this purple dot in a sea of red. And the government there is kind of a mix of conservative values and progressive ideas.
A piece of wall can be visually disintegrated from the whole into a separate triangle by plunging a diagonal of light from edge to edge on the wall; that is, side to floor, for instance.
I think what people call genre is just a question of orchestration. So, for instance, with Punch Brothers, you look at that band and say that’s a bluegrass band, when really it’s an orchestration choice.
In acting, the basic tool is observation. Whenever you see something, you store it in your head, and when you come across a character that reminds you of that instance, you incorporate it.
For instance, when I go to the premiere on Tuesday I probably won’t watch the film at all – I’ll be watching the audience just to see their reaction to different moments, what I’m doing right and what I’m doing wrong, stuff like that.
We try to reduce the danger to a minimum, of course. And then we prepare for accidents with alternate plans. For instance, if I’m turning over a stagecoach, I try to take into consideration what moves I have to make if it flips in the wrong direction. Without those emergency plans you get hurt.
In France, for instance, one magazine writer was convinced that On The Road had been a huge influence on Lost Souls and was crushed to learn that I hadn’t read the one until after I’d written the other.
I was always so jealous of a band like Fleetwood Mac, for instance, where Christine McVie would sing a whole bunch of songs even though Stevie was the obvious lead singer. It added variety to their shows.
